Kelley, William Melvin (b. 1937), novelist, short fiction writer, and educator. Born in New York, William Melvin Kelley attended Fieldston School and Harvard University. He has taught literature and writing at the New School for Social Research, the State University of New York at Geneseo, and the University of Paris, Nanterre.
From the beginning of his career in 1962, William Melvin Kelley has employed his distinctive form of black comedy to examine the absurdities surrounding American racial attitudes. His first novel showed the influence of William Faulkner by creating a microcosm in a mythical southern state; his last pays tribute to James Joyce's stylistic innovations. Like Faulkner's, his works are connected by a cast of common characters.
In A Different Drummer (1962), multiple narrators tell the intertwined histories of the Willson and Caliban families. Tucker Caliban is the descendant of a giant African king who died rather than face slavery under General Dewey Willson, leaving his infant son to become “First Caliban,” slave, and later servant to Willson, governor of his home state. Moved by an unarticulated instinct, Tucker destroys his small farm, kills his livestock, and leaves the state for the North, emancipating not only himself, his wife Bethrah, and his unborn child but the surviving members of the Willson line, who are freed from their heritage as former slaveholders. Tucker's instinctive action is contrasted not only with his ancestor's ineffective physical rebellion but with the intellectual fight against racism waged by “Black Jesuit” leader Bennett Bradshaw, a northern civil rights advocate. Tucker and his family are followed by all the African Americans in the state, which becomes the only state to have an all-white population.
Dancers on the Shore (1964) is a collection of stories that connect A Different Drummer with Kelley's later work. The first story, “The Only Man on Liberty Street”, features the illegitimate daughter of General Dewey Willson. In the last story, Wallace Bedlow, a character similar to singer Hudie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter, is one of the refugees inspired by Tucker Caliban. In “Cry for Me”, Bedlow travels to New York City, where he forms a special bond with his nephew Carlyle, a prominent character in dem (1967) and Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970). Wallace Bedlow plays his distinctive music in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village and dies during a triumphant concert at Carnegie Hall. Several stories-including “A Visit to Grandmother”, “Saint Paul and the Monkeys”, and “Christmas with the Great Man”-introduce the Dunford family.
Kelley's second novel, A Drop of Patience (1965), is the life story of blind saxophone player Ludlow Washington. Ludlow begins his career in a southern juke joint, moves to New York where he backs up a famous blues singer, Inez Cunningham, then joins a traveling band that allows him the freedom to pursue his own groundbreaking style of jazz. Based loosely on Charlie Parker, Ludlow is conquered not by drugs but by his destructive relationship with a white woman. A Drop of Patience is tied to A Different Drummer by Bethra Washington, Ludlow's daughter, who becomes the wife of Tucker Caliban.
The narrator of dem is Mitchell Pierce, whose wife, Tam, surprises him by bearing fraternal twins, one white and one black. Guided by Carlyle Bedlow and Calvin Johnson, Pierce explores Harlem, looking for his wife's African American lover, whom he has seen once when the man was dating his maid. After visiting Harlem's nightclubs and several rent parties, Mitchell realizes that Calvin (Coolidge) Johnson is the same man he met in his own kitchen, where he was introduced to him under the man's nickname, “Cooley.”
If dem is often surrealistic, Dunfords Travels Everywheres completely abandons reality. Chig Dunford lives in a foreign country where apartheid is rigorously enforced, not on a racial basis but depending on which color scheme—blue or yellow—each individual has chosen for the day. Returning to the United States by ocean liner, Dunford finds the boiler room of the ship filled with chained Africans being transported to America. Parallel to Chig's story are convoluted tales of Carlyle Bedlow's seduction of his dentist's wife and Bedlow's attempt to save a friend who has sold his soul to the devil. The novel is a mixture of straightforward narrative and language reminiscent of Finnegan's Wake.
Early in his career, Kelley distanced himself from racial questions, decrying “symbols or ideas disguised as people” (preface, Dancers on the Shore), but during the eight-year span of his career—years of turmoil for the nation—he became increasingly involved in political commentary.
Bibliography
- Roger Rosenblatt, Black Fiction, 1974, pp. 142–151.
- Donald W. Weyl, “The Vision of Man in the Novels of William Melvin Kelley,” Critique
15.3 (1974): 15–33. - Jill Weyant, “The Kelley Saga: Violence in America,” CLA Journal
19 (1975): 210–220. - Howard Faulkner, “The Uses of Tradition: William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer,” Modern Fiction Studies
21 (1975–1976): 535–542. - Addison Gayle, The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America, 1976, pp. 367–376
Robert E. Fleming
