Afternoons in Albert Murray’s Living Room

I am not the only person who has made his or her way to Albert Murray’s cozy, slightly overstuffed apartment in the heart of Harlem, nor am I the only person who regards him (in a favorite Murray phrase) as the éminence grise of omni-American arts and letters. He certainly is a man of letters, writing novels, poems, memoirs, and cultural essays; but this description neither exhausts nor explains Murray’s wide appeal. He is a raconteur and riff artist, a founding spirit of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and one of the steady voices in the PBS series Jazz (Ken Burns).

Over the last four decades Murray has played host to such longtime friends as the novelist Ralph Ellison, a schoolmate he knew at Tuskegee Institute, and the painter Romare Bearden, as well as to luminaries of a younger generation such as the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis and the literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In his late eighties Murray doesn’t get around as much as he used to, but he still occasionally lunches at the Century Club in midtown Manhattan, and in the fall of 2004 he gave a gallery talk at the Whitney Museum, vividly recalling his Paris days with Bearden. These, however, are exceptions rather than the rule. On most afternoons Murray is apartment-bound, but is always ready to hold court for nearly anybody willing to listen.

I became one of Murray’s listeners. Friends told me that he loved the chance to show off to college professors, especially when he figured that he knew as much—or more—than they did about modern literature, modern art, jazz. In my case it is easy to admit he was right: that’s how deep his knowledge runs. But it is more than a mere familiarity with what my colleagues call the texts, for what Murray conveys is a passion that often seems missing in what travels under the name academic discourse.

Murray gave me directions from my temporary digs on the Upper East Side to his place in Harlem, and did it with the painstaking detail (and repetition of detail) you would expect from a Jewish grandfather. On my earliest visits Albert always stationed himself in the doorway after the doorman buzzed him that I was on my way up, but, on my visit in October 2004, that task was taken over by his wife, Moselle. She waved me in and pointed toward the living room. Albert was sitting in his favorite chair with a three-pronged cane by his side. His cheeks looked sunken. He was not at all his former self—with the exception of his sparkling eyes and his soft-toned, sweetly chocolate southern voice.

After I sat in a nearby chair, he got right down to business: “Don’t you know that [a well-connected black writer/critic] is a fake?” He had evidently seen what I had said about this person’s latest book and found the review far too admiring: “He’s nothing but a fake,” Albert announced again.

He never tired of going through the same tirade, but, quite frankly, the long sad tale of how this critic undermined him, ’buked him, scorned him, and most of all betrayed him was turning tedious. Albert’s harangue had long ago moved beyond being a thrice-told tale, and it morphed into the dues I had to pay for the better conversations that always followed his thirty-minutes-plus of pure venting. There was no easy way to defend the largely positive review I had written. In the hothouse world of New York intellectuals, black or white, such mentor-acolyte relationships have a way of turning sour, and this one surely did.

It is ironic that what I learned at Murray’s apartment was how to relax and let the conversation flow through what he calls the “also and also and also” of his extraordinary life. For example he gave me advance glimpses of The Magic Keys (2005), the concluding novel in the Scooter series that he has been writing since 1974. Scooter is a jazz...