Cyrus Colter was a board member of Dalkey Archive Press for several years but what is even more significant is that he wrote one of the most important collections of short stories of the last fifty years, The Beach Umbrella (later retitled and expanded as The Amoralist, then republished in this same full version under its original title by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press). Despite his remarkable accomplishments as a fiction writer, he was generally ignored by critics, with a few notable exceptions, chief of whom is Reginald Gibbons, who made the following remarks at a memorial service for Cyrus Colter on May 23, 2002. (The paragraphs below have been slightly revised for Chicago Review.)
Cyrus Colter was born on January 8, 1910; he died on April 15, 2002.
Cyrus had three careers—many years in the law, a half-dozen years in higher education at Northwestern (1973–79), and the last several decades of his life as an active writer. This was an extraordinarily full life. Cyrus was a man of both seriousness and occasional uproariousness, even to excess—who yet carried within himself a certain dignity that had accrued from his long and varied experience—of people, of institutions, of art, of the lived American history that was his own life. In the years when I knew him, from late 1983 on, he was a man who, until he became ill, was composed of forcefully articulated passions and opinions about books and music, and great artistic stamina, and yet in moments of artistic crisis he honestly doubted himself, as most writers do.
Cyrus began writing at the age of fifty, published short stories in literary journals, and at the age of sixty published his first book, the memorable collection The Beach Umbrella, which was selected by judges Kurt Vonnegut and Vance Bourjaily as the first winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award and published in 1970 by the University of Iowa Press. Cyrus published five more books, all novels, and in them we see a very gifted and artistically restless writer reinventing himself several times. The Rivers of Eros (1972), a naturalistic work like The Beach Umbrella, portrays working-class Black Chicagoans confronting daily life as the scene of ultimate questions. Cyrus’s next novel, published only a year later in 1973 by The Swallow Press, was The Hippodrome, a startling departure from his first two books. As Cyrus’s friend Fred Shafer pointed out to me years ago, Cyrus belonged to the generation of Richard Wright (who was born two years earlier), but Cyrus did not publish his first book until the year Richard Wright died. The two writers were formed in the same period of American life, with its ubiquitous rituals of race relations. In Cyrus’s brief but unforgettable Hippodrome, one encounters a tremendously intense presentation of existential dilemmas of freedom and servitude against a backdrop of race, sex, and human violence, and all this does remind us somewhat of Wright’s preoccupations and his intensity, even though Cyrus’s manner and stance as a writer are different from Wright’s. Then after several years of research and writing came Cyrus’ s vast nineteenth-century novel of the twentieth-century, Night Studies (Swallow Press, 1979), in which he creates a fictional Black American political leader and his civil rights movement. (This vast book encompasses a powerful and contradictory historical novella of the Middle Passage and also a long story of slaves attempting to escape plantation owners—thus creating historical links back to the origins in slavery and racism of the civil rights movement.)
Nearly ten years later, after Cyrus’s wife Imogene had died and he had endured a period of extreme grief, he published his masterpiece, A Chocolate Soldier (Thunder’s Mouth, 1988). This remarkable book—satirical, farcical, almost surreal—portrays a quixotic young Black revolutionary, again in the midst of the American civil rights movement. But in A Chocolate Soldier Cyrus, who was always interested in the contradictions inherent in any position, created a highly unreliable narrator, who as a former friend of the revolutionary, looks back on his friend from a position of his own acquiescence and bad faith. This morally and psychologically complicated, extraordinarily deft novel ranges from the horrifying to the horrifyingly funny, and gives readers a large cast of memorable characters, Black and white, caught in American racial paradoxes, contradictions, tragedies, and unfinished struggles.
Cyrus’s final work, City of Light (Thunder’s Mouth, 1993), is a novel of ideas, not of characters, almost a kind of dialogue of philosophical positions—which in terms of the art of the novel, was yet another departure, although again it was focused on the workings of race in American society. Cyrus looked repeatedly at the textures of Black middle-class life, especially in Chicago, but also brought all sorts of characters into this work, and introduced the added factor of exile in Paris.
In all his work, Cyrus Colter inquired deeply and imaginatively into how white America racializes social relations and economic power—in blatantly opressive ways that are so complex and contradictory. Cyrus was also a passionately partisan reader of Melville and Faulkner, and like them, he aspired to produce a style, a sound, in English, that was capable of tragic depths, sweeping views, and sheer exuberance of language. This was all akin somehow to his love of the sheer scale and detail of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner.
The reception of Cyrus Colter’s work has been very disappointing to anyone who sees the scope, richness, and accomplishment of his work, and the lived experience that it represented. Most of the review comment on his work was by white writers. Far too much of it lacked understanding of his materials, and thus of what he was doing with them. There was to my mind often something repellently condescending in such comment.
Like many American writers whose purposes, goals, and ambitions are artistically serious and full of emotional and intellectual risk, Cyrus was mostly overlooked by the critical establishment of America, and was also caught in the conflicts of politicized culture, even within the Black community. Yet these obstacles and this loneliness of the long-distance writer seemed only to strengthen his will to write utterly and completely as himself—the particular person who had come from Noblesville, Indiana, to Chicago and worked his way through law school as a janitor, who became a distinguished attorney and was the first African American member of the board of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who had come from reading novels obsessively throughout his life to writing them as a mature man, who had lived being Black in white America. “You have to write out of your own chemistry as a human being!” he used to say with great conviction, when the subject of writing came up in conversation. “You have to be yourself!” he said, having heard people around him, from all sides, advising or implying that he ought to be more malleable or more mainstream or less obstreperous or more radical or more activist. What he was, though, was independent and original. He wrote books no one else could have written. And he felt within himself, I am sure, the justice of his accomplishment—a kind of justice apart from what is available to us, or not, as citizens. And his work does and should and will endure.
To read our selection from Cyrus Colter, purchase a copy of CR 62.4/63.1/2.