Peculiarities

There's a curious disclaimer on the copyright page of the Dalkey Archive Press reprint of Vincent O. Carter's book about his experiences as an African-American expatriate in Switzerland. The Bern Book, written in the 1950s in part to explain the obvious question — Why Bern? — was published in 1973 by the John Day Company (a copyright date of 1970 is also listed), and sank with barely a trace. Carter died in 1983, leaving one unpublished novel, Such Sweet Thunder, which finally came out twenty years later. This Dalkey Archive volume, with a Preface by Jesse McCarthy, was issued in 2020 amid growing appreciation for Carter's work. The disclaimer states that "There are peculiarities of style in this book, which we decided to keep from the original edition."

It's not clear exactly what "peculiarities of style" the publisher had in mind, or why they would have even considered altering the book, but of course they made the right decision in not doing so. The Bern Book is unique, to be sure, but little on the Dalkey Archive list counts as conventional, and the book poses no major challenges to a reasonably open-minded reader. I half-wondered whether "peculiarities of style" was a euphemism for "offensive material," but there's no more of that in the book than in the writings of any other frank African-American writer of Carter's day.

It's true that once or twice Carter seems to lose track of a thought in mid-sentence, but that could only have been fixed in consultation with the author, and in any case the muddles are barely noticeable. The Dalkey Archive edition, which in general is commendable, seems to have introduced a few minor typographical eccentricities in the form of superfluous hyphens that were presumably line-breaks in the first edition, and because of an apparent OCR error the name of a Swiss architect appears alternatively as Brechbühler and Brechbiihler [sic] on the same page. But this is trivial.

I suspect that Carter himself may have slipped up at the beginning of this lovely paragraph:

I had seen the city at four A.M. and six A.M. I had heard the first streetcar rumble down the street and beheld with wonder from the center of the Bahnhofplatz the last magical moment when all the streetcars stood in the station filled with the homebound who had been to the movies and to the tearooms or dancing or to choir rehearsal, strolling or working late, huddled in a tight little group under the shelter when it rained, and ranging freely, leisurely, under the strain of a pleasant fatigue when the moon shone and a warm breeze wafted them on: waiting—having boarded now the streetcars, paid and pocketed their transfers—for the signal, a short blast of a whistle. It blew! as the bell in the tower of the Evangelical church rang, and all the cars moved silently in the eleven directions from the heart of the city, while the buses coughed and whined through the shifting crowds of pedestrians which dispersed like sparks of fire before the wind.

Carter perhaps meant to write "at four A.M. and six P.M.," but the Dalkey Archive editors, if they noticed the issue at all, were right to respect the original reading.

Vincent Carter apparently spoke only rudimentary German at the time he wrote the book, and while he was familiar with the writings of Goethe and Kant he implies that he hadn't read much contemporary Swiss literature. One writer I suspect he did not know was his fellow flâneur Robert Walser, whose death came, as it happened, during the years that Carter was writing the book. In spite of their very different backgrounds, there is a not-too-distant kinship in the mixture of innocence, formality, and irritability evoked in this passage:

One day I encountered a young man upon the street who approached me in a very familiar manner, addressing me by my first name, which I found a little uncomfortable because I did not recall ever having made the gentleman's acquaintance. He presented his card and asked me if he might speak to me. "Oh, I guess so," I replied, and we went into a rather pleasant café, which was near at hand, where he ordered coffee, over which he suggested that we might speak more comfortably. And when he made it clear to me that he was paying for the coffee I relaxed in my chair and gave the young man my undivided attention, for, as you can well imagine, I was a little curious as to the nature of his business.

The appalling comic outcome of the anecdote, however, would not have happened to Walser: the young man represented a chain of supermarkets and wanted Carter, as the one black resident in Bern, to provide publicity for the opening of a new branch by donning a colorful uniform and selling bananas. Needless to say, Carter declined the offer.