HIS WAS THE VOICE: The Life of W. E. B. Du Bois

by Emma Gelders Sterne ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 26, 1971

First the testimonial of ""a black critic on the alert to detect an error of judgment"" on the author's part: ""She is not another pretentious white woman writing about a black man she admired or adulated."" Next Emma Gelder Sterne's uncomfortably disarming preface, testifying to her motives and research and justifying her ""unconventional"" 'method': ""I have employed the technique of writing in short scenes based primarily on documented fact, but fact augmented by imagination and essentially harmless invention."" Finally, after all the build-up, the book -- disappointing for a host of reasons not covered by the foregoing and devolving around problems of both form and content. Re form: biographical liberties notwithstanding (although those ""short scenes"" don't exactly make for continuity or engender a sense of direction), the very syntax reads elusively and many inserts read tendentiously, abruptly, in the manner of cliff-hangers. Re content, most crucial is the lack of critical perspective (also characteristic of Lacy's Cheer the Lonesome Traveler, 1970, p. 319, J-195): for instance, Du Bois the ideological Marxist appears to fall blindly in love with Soviet Communism -- did his hopeful Vision in effect blur his vision on his sojourns to Stalinist Russia where he saw only what he looked for? and/or has her own hagiographic orientation imposed a nearsightedness on Emma Golders Sterne's view of social history? All history is in fact distorted insofar as it exists merely as a neutral background for Du Bois' accomplishment of his mission to 'lift a corner of the Veil' behind which blacks (and by uncertain extension) all colonials live; what he did comes across clearly -- as student and scholar, teacher and professor, lecturer and editor and international lobbyist -- during a century of coping with the profound issue of the 'double consciousness' of 'free' men. Du Bois comes alive in the struggles between black and white and black and black, particularly in the NAACP years (productive but beset by internal breaches); but if the portrayal of him as a humanist and social politician is stirring and strong, the chronicle of his personal life is feeble -- ambivalent toward his childhood, quiet about his absentee fatherhood, delicate on his waning first marriage and zealously defensive on his second (to Shirley Graham, forty years his junior) which took place in his eighth decade before the move to Ghana. Like the Lacy this is a letdown, the story's innermost and outer limits still either circumscribed or circumvented; but again like the Lacy it's a start, of sorts, and W. E. B. would doubtless counsel optimism (""'Always human beings will progress. . .'"").

Pub Date: April 26, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Crowell-Collier

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION