Such Sweet Thunder (71 page)

Lottman’s 1970 essay served as the foreword to
The Bern Book
. In it he described the novel Vincent had completed in 1963 but had never gotten published, despite its having been passed around in typescript and greatly admired by a number of expatriate American writers and artists living in Europe. He wrote that when he had shown it to Richard Wright’s widow, she could hardly find words for her enthusiasm. “She finally said that such a tableau of childhood by a black man had never been done before.” Herb extolled
the work’s musical prose, its Faulknerian humor. But it was a big book, he reported, and he feared for it because of its length. What happened to that manuscript? I wondered. Did it still exist? I had to try to find it, and the hunt was on.

I located Herb in Paris in the summer of 2001. He informed me that Vincent had died in 1983, and that he had dumped his Vincent Carter file years before when moving between apartments. Vincent had never married or had children and was an only child. So if the manuscript survived the best bet for finding it might be to try to track down any members of Vincent’s extended family in K.C. Herb said that meanwhile he’d write to others who had known Vincent in Europe, and for whom he still had contact information. During the ensuing three months my efforts to locate Vincent’s family through the
Kansas City Star
archives and Kansas City Public Library were fruitless. Just about when I was ready to give up, a fax came whirring in from Herb in Paris. A Swiss friend had contacted a friend in Pennsylvania who contacted a friend in Greece who remembered the name of Vincent’s girlfriend in Bern, Liselotte Haas, and of the yoga studio she had run. The phone number for the yoga studio was still in the Bern telephone directory. One of my co-workers who is from Germany dialed the number, and Liselotte answered. A few days later, via FedEx, I held in my hands an 805-page yellowed manuscript. It had been in a box under a bed, unread, for more than thirty years.

I read
Such Sweet Thunder
with the most exhilarating sense of discovery I have ever experienced from a manuscript. I found Vincent’s rendition of the way in which Amerigo views the world at each stage of his development, how he yearns for understanding and acceptance, and above all how he experiences the love and discipline of his parents, Viola and Rutherford, all to be pitch-perfect. Amerigo immediately became real to me, as desirous and deserving of tenderness and opportunity as any child. And Vincent’s depiction of the vibrant, jostling, mysterious, fascinating surroundings rich with warmth and fun, danger and uncertainty in which Amerigo must find his way amounted to a fictional world apart as enveloping, compelling, and unforgettable as any I knew in literature. In its most accomplished moments the manuscript achieved the transcendent quality Vincent had so admired in the efforts of others and described in
The Bern Book
, that “perfect balance of form and content.”

True to the personal aesthetic he articulated in his memoir, Carter had produced a novel that was not overtly preoccupied with questions of
race. As a very young boy, Amerigo is just discovering, and not really understanding, racial prejudice. At the same time he is also learning about sexuality, love, art, literature, and life itself — the standard themes of the European
bildungsroman
. Amerigo is a dreamer, and yet it is clear that many of his dreams will go unfulfilled, not because of who he is but because of the color of his skin. This reality is abundantly clear to the reader, and to the adults who love, protect, and guide Amerigo. In time, Amerigo starts to grapple this weighty fact of life too. As for Carter’s own dreams, around the time he decided to set aside
Such Sweet Thunder
he wrote to Herb Lottman, “One day we’ll find a publisher who is right for us. But if we don’t nothing will have been lost, for the thoughts will have been thought just the same.”

When Steerforth Press published the first hardcover edition of
Such Sweet Thunder
in 2003, we copyedited the manuscript with the lightest possible hand and published it in its entirety, even though we knew that if Vincent were still alive we would have insisted on cuts and revisions. Vincent had been so precise in his selection of every word that we didn’t want to fiddle with his creation before presenting it to the world complete. Besides, the novel contained numerous scenes of such perfection and literary moments so sublime that we considered the work to be a truly great book, even with its flaws.

Then the reviews came, and as the cover and inside front pages of this volume reveal, they teemed with high praise. But they also almost universally expressed the opinion that the book’s opening, which introduced Amerigo as a soldier in an encampment in France in World War II, was inferior to the rest of the book and didn’t “work.” And that the pages that followed, in which the reader experiences the sights and sounds of Amerigo’s life from the viewpoint of a newborn, infant, and toddler were disorienting. “Reading these pages,” one reviewer said in
Newsday
, “is like trying to make one’s way through a multi-vehicle accident on a single lane highway. It’s possible that many of those long-ago editors and publishers gave up on the book before they started.

“But then, somewhere past 40, maybe 45 pages, something magical happens,” the reviewer continued. “The book takes us into its arms and transports us back in time.” This paperback version begins precisely on what had been page 45 of the hardcover edition, so that the reader immediately enters the Jones’s apartment, Amerigo’s world. Other scenes that caused the story to sag in places have been cut, along with subsequent references back to the excised passages. But the words that remain and the euphony of the prose are all Vincent’s.

The one substantive change we made before publishing the hardcover edition, with the support of Liselotte Haas, who is in fact Vincent’s literary executor, and others who knew Vincent, was to impose a title on the book that was not of Vincent’s choosing. He had intended to call it “The Primary Colors.” Hints to why he had chosen this title can be found throughout the text: There’s the treasured glass star that Old Jake gives to Amerigo near the beginning and that he carries in his pocket through the years. “He took the star and held it up in the air as the old man had done so that the sunlight shone through it, reflecting brilliant points of red, green, yellow, and blue light from its beveled edges, just like the rainbow!” And there is Amerigo’s first visit with his school class to the art gallery, where he learns to observe the color of things, and is inspired to return again and again on his own. And then of course there’s the obvious overarching connection: the book’s entire focus is on a boy’s primary years in an era when one’s color, or race, was distressingly determinative. But we chose instead to publish Vincent’s work under the title “Such Sweet Thunder,” and we hope, but will never know, that he would have approved. We think it fits the work in many ways, and it connects Vincent to two of his heroes. Duke Ellington, with Billy Strayhorn, used “Such Sweet Thunder” for the title of their 1957 tribute suite to Shakespeare. It’s a phrase taken from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Hippolyta says, “The skies, the fountains, every region near / Seem’d all one mutual cry. I never heard / So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.”

Chip Fleischer

Publisher

Hanover, New Hampshire