The System of Dante's Hell: A Novel

By Amiri Baraka and Woodie King

“A fevered and impressionistic riff on the struggles of blacks in the urban North and rural South, as told through the prism of The Inferno.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
This 1965 novel is a remarkable narrative of childhood and youth, structured on the themes of Dante’s Inferno: violence, incontinence, fraud, and treachery. With a poet’s skill, Baraka creates the atmosphere of hell, and with dramatic power he reconstructs the brutality of the black slums of Newark, a small Southern town, and New York City. The episodes contained within the novel represent both states of mind and states of the soul—lyrical, fragmentary, and allusive.
 
With an introduction by Woodie King Jr.
 
“Much of the novel is an expression of the intellectual and moral lost motion of the age . . . the special agony of the American Negro.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“It’s a tortured nightmare, excruciatingly honest and alive, painful and beautiful . . .” —Michael Rumaker, author of A Day and a Night at the Baths

• Language: English
• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Release date: Feb 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781617754142

Book preview

NEUTRALS: The Vestibule

But Dante’s hell is heaven. Look at things in another light. Not always the smarting blue glare pressing through the glass. Another light, or darkness. Wherever we’d go to rest. By the simple rivers of our time. Dark cold water slapping long wooden logs jammed 10 yards down in the weird slime, 6 or 12 of them hold up a pier. Water, wherever we’d rest. And the first sun we see each other in. Long shadows down off the top where we were. Down thru gray morning shrubs and low cries of waked up animals.

Neutrals: The breakup of my sensibility. First the doors. The brown night rolling down bricks. Chipped stone stairs in the silence. Vegetables rotting in the neighbors’ minds. Dogs wetting on the buildings in absolute content. Seeing the pitied. The minds of darkness. Not even sinister. Breaking out in tears along the sidewalks of the season. Gray leaves outside the junkshop. Sheridan Square blue men under thick quivering smoke. Trees, statues in a background of voices. Justice, Égalité. Horns break the fog with trucks full of dead chickens. Motors. Lotions.

The neutrals run jewelry shops & shit in silence under magazines. Women disappear into Canada. They painted & led interminable lives. They marched along the sides of our cars in the cold brown weather. They wore corduroy caps & listened to portables. The world was in their eyes. They wore rings & had stories about them. They walked halfway back from school with me. They were as tall as anyone else you knew. Some sulked, across the street out of sight, near the alley where the entrance to his home was. A fat mother. A fat father with a mustache. Both houses, and the irishman’s near the playground. Balls went in our yards. Strong hitters went in Angel’s. They all lived near everything.

A house painter named Ellic, The Dog, Flash. Eddie, from across the street. Black shiny face, round hooked nose, beads for hair. A thin light sister with droopy socks. Smiling. Athletic. Slowed by bow legs. Hustler. Could be made angry. Snotty mouth. Hopeless.

The mind fastens past landscapes. Invisible agents. The secret trusts. My own elliptical. The trees’ shadows broaden. The sky draws together darkening. Shadows beneath my fingers. Gloom grown under my flesh.

Or fasten across the lots, the gray garages, roofs suspended over cherry trees. The playground fence. Bleakly with guns in the still thin night. Shadows of companions drawn out along the ground. Newark Street green wood, chipped, newsstands. Dim stores in the winter. Thin brown owners of buicks.

And this not the first. Not beginnings. Smells of dreams. The pickles of the street’s noise. Fire escapes of imagination. To fall off to death. Unavailable. Delayed into whispering under hurled leaves. Paper boxes roll down near the pool. From blue reflection, through the fence to the railroad. No trains. The walks there and back to where I was. Night queens in winter dusk. Drowning city of silence. Ishmael back, up through the thin winter smells. Conked hair, tweed coat, slightly bent at the coffee corner. Drugstore, hands turning the knob for constant variation. Music. For the different ideas of the world. We would turn slowly and look. Or continue eating near the juke box. Theories sketch each abstraction. Later in his old face ideas were ugly.

Or be wrong because of simple movement. Not emotion. From under all this. The weight of myself. Not even with you to think of. That settled. Without the slightest outside.

Stone on stone. Hard cobblestones, oil lamps, green house of the native. Natives down the street. All dead. All walking slowly toward their lives. Already, each Sunday forever. The man was a minister. His wife was light-skinned with freckles. Their church was tall brown brick and sophisticated. Bach was colored and lived in the church with Handel. Beckett was funeral director with brown folding chairs. On W. Market St. in winters the white stripe ran down the center of my thots on the tar street. The church sat just out of shadows and its sun slanted down on the barbershops.

Even inside the house, linoleums were cold. Divided in their vagueness. Each man his woman. Their histories die in the world. My own. To our children we are always and forever old. Grass grew up thru sidewalks. Mr. & Mrs. Puryear passed over it. Their gentle old minds knew my name. And I point out forever their green grass. Brown unopened books. The smell of the world. Just inside the dark bedroom. The world. Inside the sealed eyes of obscure relatives. The whole world. A continuous throb in the next room.

He raced out thru sunlight past their arms and crossed the goal. Or nights with only the moon and their flat laughter he peed under metal stairs and ran through the cold night grinning. Each man his own place. Each flower in its place. Each voice hung about me in this late evening. Each face will come to me now. Or what it was running through their flesh, all the wild people stalking their own winters.

The street was always silent. Green white thick bricks up past where we could see. An open gate to the brown hard gravel no one liked. Another day grew up through this. Crowds down the street. Sound in red waves waves over the slow cold day. To dusk. To black night of rusty legs. These little girls would run after dark past my house, sometimes chased by the neighbor hoods. A long hill stuck against the blue glass. From there the woman, the whore, the dancer, the lesbian, the middleclass coloured girl spread her legs. Or so my father said. The dog Paulette was on fire, and I slipped out through the open window to the roof. Then shinnied down to the ground. I hid out all night with some italians.

HEATHEN: No. 1

1

You’ve done everything you said you wdn’t. Everything you said you despised. A fat mind, lying to itself. Unmoving like some lump in front of a window. Wife, child, house, city, clawing at your gentlest parts. Romance become just sad tinny lies. And your head full of them. What do you want anymore? Nothing. Not poetry or that purity of feeling you had. Even that asceticism you pulled in under your breast that drunks & schoolfriends thought of as sense of humor . . . gone, erased, some subtle rot disposed in its place. Turning toward everything in your life. Whatever clarity left, a green rot, a mud, a stifling at the base of the skull. No air gets in.

*   *   *

The room sat quiet in the evening under one white bulb. He sat with a glass empty at his right hand. A cigarette burning the ugly dining-room table. Unanswered letters, half-thumbed magazines, old books he had to reread to remember. An empty fight against the sogginess that had already crept in thru his eyes. A bare bulb on a cluttered room. A dirty floor full of food particles and roaches. Lower middleclass poverty. In ten years merely to lose one’s footing on a social scale. Everything else, that seriousness, past, passed. Almost forgotten. The wild feeling of first seeing. Even a lost smell plagued the back of his mind. Coffee burning downtown when he paced the wet pavement trying to look intense. And that walked thru him like weather.

*   *   *

I feel sick and lost and have nothing to place my hands on. A piano with two wrong notes. Broken chinese chimes. An unfaithful wife. Or even one that was faithful a trudgen round me. Everything I despise some harsh testimonial of my life. The Buddhism to affront me. Ugly Karma. My thin bony hands. Eyes fading. Embarrassed at any seriousness in me. Left outside I lose it all. So quickly. My youth wasted on the bare period of my desires.

*   *   *

He lived on a small street with 8 trees. Two rooming houses at the end of the street full of Puerto Ricans. Rich white americans between him and them. Like a chronicle. He said to himself often, looking out the window, or simply lying in bed listening to the walls breathe. Or the child whimper under the foul air of cat leavings pushed up out of the yard by some wind. Nothing more to see under flesh but himself staring bewildered. At his hands, his voice, his simple benumbing life. Not even tragic. Can you raise tears at an unpainted floor. The simple incompetence of his writing. The white wall smeared with grease from hundreds of heads. All friends. Under his hands like domestic lice. The street hangs in front of the window & does not even breathe. Trucks go to New Jersey. The phone rings and it will be somebody he does not even understand. A dope addict who has written short stories. A thin working girl who tells jokes to his wife. A fat jew with strange diseases. A rich woman with paint on her slip. Hundreds of innocent voices honed to a razor-sharp distress by their imprecise lukewarm minds. Not important, if they moved in his head nothing would happen, he thought once. And then he stopped/embarrassed, egoistic. A cold wind on his neck from a smeared half-open window. The cigarette burned the table. The bubbles in the beer popped. He stared at his lip & tried to bite dried skin.

Nothing to interest me but myself. Disappeared, even the thin moan of ideas that once slipped through the pan of my head. The night is colder than the day. Two seconds lost in that observation. The same amount of time to stroke Nijinski’s cheek. One quick soft move of my fingers on his face. That two seconds then that same two if they would if there were some way, would burn my soul to black ash. Scorch my thick veins.

I am myself. Insert the word disgust. A verb. Get rid of the am. Break out. Kill it. Rip the thing to shreds. This thing, if you read it, will jam your face in my shit. Now say something intelligent!

2

I’ve loved about all the people I can. Frank, for oblique lust, his mind. The satin light floating on his words. His life tinted and full of afternoons. My own a weird dawn. Hedges & that thin morning water covering my skin. I had a hat on and wdn’t sit down. Light was emptying the windows and someone else slept close to us, fouling the room with his breath. That cdn’t move. It killed itself. And opens stupidly now like a time capsule. You don’t rub your mouth on someone’s back to be

Reviews for The System of Dante's Hell

[nataliesw · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'd read Dante's "The Inferno" (in English) a couple of times and was very much looking forward to reading this book. Baraka wrote it in 1963 when he was still LeRoi Jones; Woodie King Jr., producer and director of the writer's plays points out in his introduction this was a time when "America had not yet witnessed the Watts Riots, Malcolm had not been assassinated, the the Black Arts Movement was not in ascendance..." Though I'd heard of Baraka's last play, "The Most Dangerous Man in America," about WEB DuBois, I haven't seen it, nor did I know the writer's name — unfortunately a big gap in my education.Knowing that this experimental work had for its writer an intense connection with Dante's gave me a place to start. The language and imagery of "The System of Dante's Hell" are powerful and vivid, and forcefully push forward even an uninformed reader. It is both poetry and novel, free-form, yet it corresponds with the structure of Hell in Dante's work.There is freedom, however, and there is freedom. Baraka’s form of writing can be called free in that it is not in accordance with any classically European poetic form like that with which Dante wrote. Even without such a rigorous set of rules to constrain his expression, however, his words and meaning are imbued with imprisonment, the imprisonment of his life.Dante used a constraining form of writing to express imprisonment in the tortures of Hell for eternity as the consequences of choices made in life. Baraka, whose time, place and conventions of writing are different, makes what choices he can. Terrifyingly, for a black person in America, those choices are made in a life that is already Hell.I have to confess that there is a lot that I don’t understand in this book. If I have misread it, please forgive me; know that I am moved and impressed by what I have read, and no disrespect is intended.

[abealy_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The System of Dante's Hell is a brilliant prose poem structured on the themes of Dante's Inferno exposing the pain and violence of early 60's Newark slums, a southern youth and the beat precincts of New York's Greenwich Village. Baraka's language sings and his denouement pierces — there is very little middle ground. It is a work of it's time — free-form jazz, abstract art and beat cadence flow through this short but dense autobiographical novel.

[mdbrady_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Angry, experimental prose by an influential twentieth-century African American.Amiri Baraka (1934-2004) was a leading voice in defining African American literature. He was a poet, a novelist, a music critic, and university teacher who exhorted blacks to create their own artistic forms rather than imitate those of whites. He and his political writing has been widely praised and attacked. In the 1960s, he gave up his birth name, LeRoy Jones, and took a leading role in the more militant movements of the time rather than in the non-violent civil rights movement. His later work lays bare black hatred and violence. The System of Dante’s Hell, written at this time, is meant to convey the depths of pain and isolation in urban ghettos. Written largely in prose, the book is highly complex, impressionistic, and non-linear.While I recognize Baraka’s power and wanted to read his work, I lacked the skill to decipher his words. His anger and contempt were evident, but I needed more structure. I applaud Akashic Books for republishing this important book and recommend it to more cosmopolitan readers than myself.Thanks to Akashic Books for a review copy of this book.

[librarylord99 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Amiri Baraka is probably best know for his "inside job" conspiracies about 911. A vicious anti-semite, he blamed the Jews and George Bush for the attacks on 911 and also was pro-rape in his early days. Calling for the rape of white women as a political statement. I am capable of separating politics and art, but some people cannot. Once you get past his revolting worldview, his writing reminds one of Burroughs although with a little more jazz to it. I was over beat writing once I discovered other literary writers, so this kind of felt like revisiting old hat. This novel should appeal to college students and poetry lovers, both of which I am not. It is in fact a novel comprised of the hell in his head, yet reads like what would have been cutting edge poetry in his time.It annoys me when black intellectuals get a pass on anti-semitism and talk about harming whites. I carried this into the book, so perhaps someone more naive then myself would have been a better judge of the writing,

[michaelg16 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hot beautiful angry poetry flowing like lava out of the mouth of a sixties art volcano is a more accurate description than the narrative novel described on the cover copy. I was first introduced to LeRoi Jones when as a college student I was blasted and impressed by reading his plays Dutchman/and The Slave. My reference point was quite limited by age and experience but I was drawn to his powerful words nonetheless. Since then I only briefly read him as he became Amiri Baraka and followed him from afar through the years until his death. This work is a wondrous surprise and a take on Inferno as imagined by a black city-youth with more language than he knew what to do with. I am exhausted and a little scared.

[kara.shamy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Amiri Baraka's The System of Dante's Hell is a brilliant little book I am grateful to have discovered. I had previously read Baraka's criticism (e.g. Blues People, published under the name LeRoi Jones) and was generally familiar with his reputation as a poet. To my knowledge, this is Baraka's only novel (originally published ca. 1965) and one of only two of this prolific writer's published works in the fiction category.The newly published small paperback volume of just 160 pages belies the depth of the novel's thematic content as well as the complexity of its form. Baraka riffs on the structure of hell originally set forth by Dante to outline his perspective on humanity's faults, which is set forth in an unorthodox, stream-of-consciousness style. In addition to a pretty fascinating formal presentation, Baraka's work features ideas that command the reader's attention due to their particular boldness and poignancy. I highly recommend this work to prior readers of Baraka, those interested in exploring his work's particular political and social themes (at this time in his career or generally), as well as to any lover of bold ideas in brilliant literary form. Baraka's prose always punches through to strike the audience with his meaning, as it were, and yet it also rewards close scrutiny of its textual nuances by readers so inclined.Thank you for reading my thoughts. I hope they can be useful as you evaluate this prospective read. Note: It was my great good fortune to win a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.