Major Mysteries: On Leon Forrest’s “Divine Days”

IT IS VERY tempting to describe Leon Forrest’s Divine Days in terms of its two most broadly cited influences: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and jazz. Initially published in 1992, the magisterial novel, arguably one of the great works of African American literature (certainly among the longest) was largely forgotten, but it has now been triumphantly reissued in a lovely edition by the newly launched Seminary Co-op Offsets, a collaboration between the famous academic bookstore and Northwestern University Press.

Forrest’s big book has been called the “Ulysses of Chicago’s South Side,” and it is, indeed, a voluminous novel that contains a world, through a closely observed chronicle of a brief span of time (a week, rather than a day), and a sprawling cast of characters, all wonderfully vivid and full-bodied, even when they only appear for a page or two. You will not rebuild Chicago (here disguised as Forest County) from the map of Divine Days, but there is nonetheless a certain pleasure, especially for Hyde Parkers, to be found in identifiable street names and places (“We turned east on 55th Street and soon were circling through the park”); many will smile in recognition at Timmy’s Tap. Joubert Jones, our (primary) narrator, has more than a touch of Stephen Dedalus about him (“I remain the snotty-nosed, uncircumcised, unclean bard of my race”) and is similarly introspective, philosophical, and filled with yearning to create a great work of art.

If this kind of comparison to Joyce seems unappealing in that it threatens to accord Forrest’s masterpiece a secondary or derivative status, we might, alternatively, say that Divine Days is an extended jazz improvisation, and Ulysses is one of its signature motifs. There are the many explicit references (“when he started to reciting Molly Bloom’s speech at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, somebody suggested that perhaps he’d better join the Finnies Club for Gay Men”) and just as many subtler, more playful ones (“I saw JOYCE MOVERS heading slowly down the street towards the expressway”). But even more delightful are the various sly invocations that only those who have actually spent time with Ulysses will recognize, such as the repeated allusions to the fox burying its grandmother under a holly bush or lines like, “Damnest thing to see him, twice in one day. With a silvery moon blond, no less pinched to his sleeve. Wearing a white mackintosh.” These clever allusions are themselves very Joycean forms of reference, but as with the Irish author’s work, the open and assured way that Forrest’s novel draws on a longer literary history gives it a flavor all its own (it’s notable that the various invocations of Shakespeare in Divine Days called me back to Stephen Dedalus’s similar ruminations rather than to the English master). Is that what it means to be a great artist, to draw on the legacy of those who came before and make it your own?

Joyce is hardly the only figure of canonical Western literature to crop up in Forest County—he is joined not only by Shakespeare but also by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Luigi Pirandello, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Hardy, Edgar Allan Poe, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Virgil, and Sophocles, not to mention a pantheon of African American figures: Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, James Baldwin (referenced but not named, intriguingly), Jean Toomer, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday. Themes, images, plotlines, and signature phrases from the creations of these various august personages play through the massive novel—as well as snatches of poetry and fragments of song. It is a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic effect, a freewheeling parade of the great works of Western art, with everyone donning costumes and making a cameo.

But here, once again, we risk missing the thing itself; talking around this great book, examining whose shoulders it stands upon, we lose the center. This is precisely what Divine Days keeps tempting us to do: it tricks us, shifting, redirecting our gaze. It seems odd to describe such a weighty tome as elusive, but despite its heft, it is remarkably light on its feet. Whose story is it really? What is this novel actually about?

At the novel’s opening, Joubert Jones has returned to Forest County after two years in the army, having been informed of the death of a man known as Sugar-Groove, or Sugar-Grove, or a variety of other nicknames, by his aunt Eloise. He intends to write a play about Sugar-Groove’s life, and in the process, he says, “I personally hope to discover a meaning of existence out of this man’s divine days upon this planet.” Joubert has already written one play—which is returned to him, marked unopened but clearly read by someone—about another notable resident of Forest County, the preacher/con man W. A. D. Ford. Nursing his grievances, Joubert works on his writing and pours drinks at Eloise’s Night Light Lounge, his aunt’s bar (if nothing else, this novel belongs in the canon of great depictions of the milieu of day-drinking regulars). Eloise, meanwhile, is encouraging him to write for the Forest County Dispatch, where she has a regular gossip column:

There are, however, many minor voices and major mysteries that Aunt Eloise can’t elaborate upon within the structure of her gossip column, even when the essential storyline gives voice to an important issue, or fact. Often the facts of our lives lead you everywhere and nowhere, as you hitch your wagon to a star. In the case of Sugar-Groove, this point seems seminal to his wandering soul.

And so we follow Joubert on his jaunts around the city, from bar to barbershop and back again, and through somewhat rambling, freely associating tales that blend his own recollections and those of the people he encounters.

It is notable that Joubert sees himself as a playwright rather than a novelist. This commitment to the stage rather than the page is ostensibly born out of a fidelity to voice. “[M]y heritage is hounded by the voices of oral tradition, literary tradition. Chased up into the church, the steeple in order to reveal the people,” Joubert tells us at the outset. All his life he has been hearing voices, and it is his task to “shut [his] mouth up! And listen to those voices wherever they take [him].” Appropriate to this task, large chunks of the novel are reported monologue, as Joubert records someone else’s story—most frequently, those of Williemain the barber, a close friend of Sugar-Groove, but any person he meets is liable to launch into a tale that stretches over the next few pages. Yet the formal magnificence of Divine Days is based, in part, on the tricks of the novelist rather than the playwright: its dazzling array of different kinds of narrative voice, as it hops smoothly from first person to third, dipping into quotation and free indirect discourse and then back into inner monologue so quickly that you frequently forget who is speaking—a trick that is impossible on the stage. Thus, the text is at its most novelistic precisely when it pretends to aspire to the stage—a clever sleight of hand.

In a similar kind of trick, though we may be tempted to proclaim Joubert Jones the great bard of his people because of the voices that speak to and through him, here too the novel checks us, repeatedly undercutting the premise. Joubert is not the only one to hear voices. Early on, we learn, Imani/De Loretto, the painter and social worker, hears them as well, though hers, she says, are the voices of African ancestors. Joubert is intrigued by the idea of a fellow medium but also distracted by the possibility of seduction. Resigning himself to the failure of such hopes, he says, “Perhaps I would never possess De Loretto’s body, but I might face her soul to soul, voice to voice. This then shall be my fate; and if the experience helps me to understand the obsessive voices from within—so be it.” By the novel’s end, however, he is questioning his relationship to the painter, wondering whether he has done her justice. Accused of milking her story for his own drama, he questions himself: “Wasn’t I too something of a scavenger, when all was said and done, and undone?” What is an artist if not a grave robber? Is Joubert Jones the writer really so different from the con man?

Voice itself comes to seem questionable, unreliable—most fascinatingly, in the character of a lost young girl, Cinderella/Iris Lilybridge, whose speech Joubert and his friends can barely make out as they struggle to understand her pleas for assistance. Yet Joubert insists to himself that he can hear her unspoken words, a “speculation of her voice, that [he] thought [he] heard so plainly.” When they get into a cab, however, her voice has changed, from that of a lost child to a flirtatious woman, revealing “voices inside of voices [that] seemed to turn inside out: playing in and out the window, at a maddening pace. Spiralling into spinoffs from spirituals and gospel songs.” Who is his fellow passenger really, and is he her protector or something more unsavory?

The voices of women, it seems, present a particular difficulty for Joubert, and also implicitly pose a threat to his authority as an artist. When the little girl hands him a crumpled-up paper, he is “hit by a bolt of lightning over the dramatic power, intelligence, urgency of this petition in grief-crepe spun out of heart and head. Where had this little West Side urchin-angel-chile learned to write, nay to compose, as well, a sonnet?” The novel raises questions indirectly, but clearly nonetheless, cannily: Does the anointing of Joubert Jones as a great artist, a collector of voices, come at the cost of the subordination of these various women—Aunt Eloise, Cinderella/Iris, De Loretto/Imani? Whose story is he really telling? “Why the fuck,” the painter asks him, “don’t you write a play about that con-play these terminal brothers steady running on their sisters, and the welfare state’s steady running on us all[?]” Once again, we ask: what does it mean to be an artist?

But wasn’t this supposed to be the story of Sugar-Groove? We turn once more. Who was this man, glimmering charismatic ladies’ man in one light, tormented and lonely soul in another? “I’ve often wondered not how Sugar-Groove was able to keep body and soul together, but rather how he was able to keep them together, in one place, at one time. For he seemed always flying off in so many directions at the same time,” Joubert muses. Sugar-Groove’s story, ostensibly the centerpiece of the work, orbits one primal scene, tracing its fated consequences and origins. But here again we are redirected by the collisions with another magnetic figure, the W. A. D. Ford who was the protagonist of Joubert Jones’s previous play and repeatedly comes back to haunt the Sugar Man’s biography. Whose story is this again?

One typically speaks of very long novels as encyclopedic, as weighty, as offering a totalizing vision of a world. But Divine Days is a kind of trickster tale, shifting among protagonists who are themselves constantly presenting a different face, a different name, a different side of their character. Playfully meta, the novel seems to anticipate and preempt all the things that critics are likely to say about it. Set in the 1960s, written in the 1980s, it nonetheless seems to speak, in remarkably prescient ways, to our present moment, and to debates about art, identity, and justice. Hopefully, this beautiful new edition will allow the novel to be recognized and appreciated as it deserves.

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Katarzyna Bartoszyńska is the author of Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), and a translator. She teaches at Ithaca College.