Alex Haley (11 page)

That day Haley stood in a long line at a Harlem funeral home to view Malcolm's body. “Under the glass lid, I glimpsed the delicate white shrouding over the chest and up like a hood about the face on which I tried to concentrate for as long as I could. All that I could think was that it was he, all right—Malcolm X. . . . Malcolm looked to me—just waxy and
dead.
” At the funeral the following day, Haley heard the actor Ossie Davis eulogize Malcolm as “our manhood, our living black manhood! That was his meaning to our people.”
27

For mainstream opinion makers, the original, allegedly racist, and violent Malcolm was the one he had remained until his death. The
New York Times
editors wrote, “The life and death of Malcolm X provides a discordant but typical theme for the times in which we live.” Malcolm, in the editors' view, had turned his “many true gifts to evil purpose. . . . His ruthless and fanatical belief in violence not only set him apart from the responsible leaders of the civil rights movement and the overwhelming majority of Negroes,” but it marked him “for a violent end.” Carl Rowan, the black newspaperman then heading the United States Information Agency, surpassed the
Times
's harsh judgment, declaring, “Here was a Negro, who preached segregation and race hatred, killed by another Negro . . . that preaches segregation and race hatred, and neither of them representative of more than a tiny minority of the Negro population of America.” Rowan was angry that newspapers in Africa were treating Malcolm as a civil rights martyr. Attendees at Malcolm's funeral hissed at the mention of Rowan's name.
28

Haley's response to Malcolm's death seemed to lack emotion. Perhaps the long-standing threats had made the violent act, while shocking, also feel inevitable. The previous June, Haley had begged Malcolm to be careful, but when he returned from his hegira in November, he constantly put himself in harm's way. The night of the assassination, Haley wrote to Reynolds that he would have the manuscript by the following Friday. Haley was going to write an epilogue, “short, but I hope dramatic, about this man as I knew him, and actually I knew him pretty well.” In fact, when he finished it, six months later, the epilogue was one-sixth of the book.
29

* * *

In mid-March 1965
Paul Reynolds was having no success finding another publisher. He had hopes for Dell or the New American Library. “You understand, the public is less inclined to read a book about a man no longer alive,” he told Haley. “Malcolm X is untried in the book field. He is no longer living, and it's a big guess how many people will rush to buy this book when it is brought out.” It was harder now to sell the book because Doubleday's rejection made other publishers fear the controversy surrounding the life of Malcolm. Even so, Reynolds was determined still to get “a good royalty so that if this has a very large sale, you and Malcolm X's Estate will make a great deal of money, perhaps $100,000 or more. But I am no miracle worker and I think we ought to grab Dell if we can.” Then both Dell and New American Library turned him down. McGraw-Hill thought the manuscript needed much editorial work. The Playboy Press editor said that he thought the writing was “little more than ordinary.”
30

A few weeks later Grove Press agreed to publish the book. Grove was the only publishing house that showed “any solid interest,” one of Reynolds's associates admitted. Barney Rosset, Grove's publisher, had made history in American publishing when he brought to the American reader the works of Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Harold Pinter—all winners of the Nobel Prize for literature—and many of the Beat writers, including William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Rosset's singular triumph was printing and then defending in court Henry Miller's
Tropic of Capricorn
against obscenity charges. Rosset had lived with controversy throughout his publishing career and was not afraid about any that might arise from
The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
31

Haley later claimed that he had sat down in the immediate aftermath of Malcolm's assassination and written the epilogue in two weeks. In fact, in May, after the deal was struck with Grove, it was still not written. “Grove Press is being very nice, and everybody is being very nice,” Reynolds wrote to Haley on May 11, “but I think you are going to delay the book and delay sales and I really think you should stay up day and night until you get this done.”
32

Haley's delay in finishing the autobiography owed once again to his propensity to move on to the next project before the current one was finished. As always, he did so out of desperation for money. The IRS was making ever more serious threats about the consequences Haley would face if he did not pay some of the back taxes he owed. In May 1965 he met with theatrical producers in the hope of getting a commitment to put his black-themed musical “The Way” on stage. He proposed to Reynolds yet another book, a personal memoir, “The Malcolm X I Knew.” Reynolds thought that was a bad idea, as was his proposal for a biography of the flamboyant and controversial lawyer Melvin Belli, with whom Haley was doing a
Playboy
interview. Finish the Malcolm book, Reynolds pleaded.
33

In fact, the book was finished in time for him to have galleys by June 22. He added chapters on Malcolm's break with the NOI, his journeys to Africa and Mecca, and his sense of American society at the moment he died. Haley had achieved a nicely rounded narrative arc. The chapters in Africa and Saudi Arabia, while flat and without conflict, told of Malcolm's conversion to faith in universal humanity without racial distinction and his embrace of pan-Africanism, a belief that all black people were related and should share a pride in that heritage. Malcolm had come to advance a form of black nationalism that shed much of its anger and its anti-white hatred. Haley had originally intended an epilogue to be his critique of the anti-white, anti-Christian views of the Nation of Islam, but Malcolm's own rejection of the sect made such a critique superfluous. In its final form the epilogue was far less an ideological corrective or critique than it was an account of Haley's work with Malcolm. Its length allowed Haley to extend the story of the relationship between the two men from its initial wariness to tolerance and finally to friendship and affection. It thus had an arc that paralleled the turn of Malcolm's narrative. Haley refrained from expressing admiration for, or friendship with, Malcolm, perhaps because Haley wanted to leave the impression of detachment. Even with Malcolm's transformation and his arrival at a philosophical view closer to Haley's own, the writer was restrained in his final assessment of Malcolm: “He was the most electric personality I have ever met, and I still can't quite conceive him dead.”
34

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
was published in September 1965. It was reviewed widely, with universal praise from black newspapers and journals and mostly positive reviews elsewhere. There were excellent notices in leading newspapers. The
New York Times
's Eliot Fremont-Smith called the book “brilliant, painful,” and a “document of our time.” In the
Washington Post,
the veteran civil rights activist Bayard Rustin expressed the view that one of the book's best features was its account of Malcolm's chaotic childhood, the beginning of the journey “of an American Negro in search of his identity and place in society.” Malcolm had brought “hope and a measure of dignity to thousands of despairing ghetto Negroes.” In the
Yale Review,
the southern writer
Robert Penn Warren wrote that much of the book's value lay in Malcolm's telling whites and many blacks “what it means to be a Negro in America in this century, or at least what it so dramatically meant to one of unusual intelligence and powerful personality.” Dissent came in the
New York Review of Books
from I. F. Stone, a radical journalist, who preferred a book of Malcolm's speeches to the
Autobiography,
because Malcolm's “most important message to his people,” pan-Africanism, was muted in the
Autobiography
—“perhaps because Alex Haley, its writer, is politically conventional.”
35

Starting in 1967 the book sold at the rate of seventy-five thousand copies per month, for a total of more than two million by 1969. A 1969 survey of college bookstores reported that
The
Autobiography of Malcolm X
was on the list of the ten most-read books on six of the eight campuses (four from the Ivy League) reporting, its popularity surpassed only by that of Eldridge Cleaver's memoir,
Soul on Ice.
36
Asked to explain the book's popularity, a man in Harlem said that Malcolm had given blacks “a sense of history they had never known before, a sense of pride and destiny. And the key point is that he spoke from the world of the streets.”
Time
magazine and the
New York Times
named
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
among the ten most important books of the 1960s.
37

Over time, some readers became skeptical of the dramatic turn in Malcolm's racial attitudes. In his 2011 biography of Malcolm, Manning Marable attributed the transformation, as related in the autobiography, to Haley's desire to undermine the potential influence of black nationalism. Haley's rendering of Malcolm as a liberal reformer and integrationist, Marable wrote, undercut the militancy and radicalism for which Marable thought he really stood. Marable said that the autobiography “does not read like a manifesto for black insurrection” but like the traditional American autobiography of self-education and self-help. Marable blamed Haley for this interpretation. Marable himself would be subject to the same accusation—that he had minimized Malcolm's commitment to revolutionary black nationalism. Marable's accusers made no mention of Haley's having similarly diminished the revolutionary content of Malcolm's message. The intense hostility to Marable, who died three days before his book came out, suggested that the great devotion to Malcolm that existed among scholars and activists who discussed “Malcolm X studies” as a distinct discipline, based on the autobiography and collections of his speeches.
38

The Autobiography of Malcolm X,
in fact, contained sufficient elasticity of meaning to gain a broad and disparate readership. To many, Malcolm's transformation was a comforting rejection of racial and religious intolerance. He seemed to have been on the verge of becoming a major international race reformer, one who was killed by Black Muslims before he could realize his great potential for good; he was thus a tragic hero. To other readers,
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
was a statement of black anger and a rationale for an aggressive black response to the historic mistreatment of African Americans. Todd Burroughs, an academic advocate of black nationalism, later credited the autobiography with having “intellectually birthed so many of us in the first place.” In the years after 1965, when black anger was given voice much more freely, Malcolm's story would be valued widely for the aggressive, anti-white message of the early chapters. In 1992, with the appearance of Spike Lee's film on Malcolm, 84 percent of blacks between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four viewed Malcolm as a “hero for black Americans today.” Barack Obama, who read the autobiography as a teenager struggling with his racial identity, took from it the message that it was “important for African-Americans to assert their manhood, their worth. . . . That affirmation that I am a man, I am worth something . . . Malcolm X probably captured that better than anybody.”
39

In due course, the book was recognized as one of the greatest of American autobiographies. It remains on required-reading lists in high schools and colleges. In 1997
The Norton Anthology of African American Literature
included a long excerpt from the book and noted that it “remains a classic of American autobiography.” In a 2010 book dedicated to scholarly appreciation of Malcolm's significance, the literary critic Robert E. Terrill wrote that
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
was “the fundamental text at the center of all studies of Malcolm,” a “literary masterpiece” that showed his own transformation and, “through his eyes, the world in which and against which he wrought those changes.”
40

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
conformed to the genre patterns established two centuries earlier in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography in the way that it moved, as the literary scholar Carol Ohmann wrote, from “inexperience to sophistication, from ignorance to enlightenment, from obscurity to worldly prominence.” Like Franklin, Malcolm projected himself as a rational man committed to understanding and mastering society. As with many other American autobiographies—those of Andrew Carnegie and Booker T. Washington are examples—Malcolm embraced the Franklin virtues: cleanliness, frugality, morality, and hard work. But
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
was also distinctly African American in the way that it conformed to patterns established by previous memoirs and autobiographies by black writers, works that Robert B. Stepto has referred to collectively as the “narrative of ascent.”
41

In its re-creation of one life,
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
was not objective or definitive. No less an authority than W. E. B. Du Bois admitted in his third and last autobiography that such was impossible: “Autobiographies do not form indisputable authorities. They are always incomplete, and often unreliable. Eager as I am to put down the truth, there are difficulties; memory fails especially in small details, so that it becomes finally but a theory of my life, with much forgotten and misconceived, with valuable testimony but often less than absolutely true, despite my intention to be frank and fair.”
42