Marcus Garvey remains the most confounding figure in the history of black America. Arriving in the United States in 1916, the 28-­year-­old Jamaican emigrant, of slip­shod ­self-­education and without connections, rapidly created what the distinguished black historian John Hope Franklin called the first black mass movement in the history of the United States. Garvey’s Universal Negro Im­prove­ment Association claimed a worldwide membership in the millions; his weekly journal, 

, had a circulation of 50,000. At the height of his influence, Garvey drew thousands of black people every night to rallies in ­Harlem.

He deliberately set himself in contrast to the fledgling NAACP. Garvey advocated racial separation, making common cause with ­white-­supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan: “I regard the Klan, the ­Anglo-­Saxon Clubs, and White American Societies as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.” The NAACP was Fabian in its strategy of ­low-­key lobbying and public education to protect black political and civil rights. Garvey roared, “The Ku Klux Klan is going to make this a white man’s country. . . . Fighting them is not going to get you anywhere.”

How, then, could Garvey command the almost ­hysterical devotion of the black masses? Through a commanding oratory that hypnotically invoked racial pride. “The man spoke,” James Weldon Johnson wrote in 

 (1930), “and his magnetic personality, torrential eloquence, and intuitive knowledge of crowd psychology were all brought into play.” Garvey vowed to “organize the 400,000,000 Negroes of the world into a vast organization to plant the banner of freedom on the great continent of Africa.”

Johnson remarked upon Garvey’s “Napol­eonic personality,” and he certainly dressed the part, sporting a “military hat tipped with white feathers, black broadcloth trousers with a gold stripe down the side, a Sam Browne belt across his chest, gold epaulettes, a gold sword, and white gloves.” Though the spectacle caused W. E. B. Du Bois to mutter that “a casual observer might have mistaken it for the ­dress-­rehearsal of a new comic opera,” to his devoted followers Garvey was what he pro­claimed himself to be: the Provisional Presi­dent of Africa, the man who would reclaim the continent from its colonialist masters and establish a homeland where an oppressed people would rediscover its lost ­glory.

And the people were willing to put their money where Garvey’s mouth was. At its peak, in 1919 and 1920, Garvey’s movement amassed more than $600,000 (the equivalent today of more than $7 million), with which Garvey proposed to extend Booker T. Washington’s pastoral ideal of black economic ­self-­sufficiency into the entrepreneurial age of the Roaring Twenties. He told his followers he would initiate a business venture every month: a lunchroom, a restaurant, a tearoom, an ­ice-­cream parlor. These were, however, but overtures to the inauguration of a steamship company, the Black Star Line. As Colin Grant writes in his biography of Garvey, 

, not only would the steamship line “operate between American ports and those of Africa, the West Indies, and Central and South America,” but to devoted Garveyites the Black Star would also be the mechanism through which “a ­latter-­day Moses . . . was going to lead them to the Promised Land.” Five thousand black people cheered the maiden voyage of the line’s first steamer as it left New York’s 135th Street pier in November ­1919.

“Of course, the bubble burst,” Johnson wrote. Garvey and his entourage knew nothing about ships—not even how to shop for them. The vessel that thousands cheered was in such drastic need of repair that one Universal Negro Improvement Association official despaired, “She could not have been worth a penny over $25,000 when the Black Star Line acquired her for $165,000.” (Two other ships broke down on their initial voyages and never returned to New York.) By January 1922 the Black Star Line was bankrupt, costs outrunning capital by nearly $89,000 (just over $1 million today).

Garvey was convicted of federal fraud charges in 1923. His ­five-­year sentence was commuted by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927, and Garvey, who had never become a U.S. citizen, was immediately deported to Jamaica. Irrepressibly, he announced plans for a new steamship company, as well as a campaign to collect $600 million for a worldwide program of global black ­uplift.

However, exiled from his base in Harlem, Garvey was a leader in search of followers. A newspaper account of his talk in 1928 in London’s Royal Albert Hall, which seated 10,000, was headlined, “9800 Empty Seats.” In 1940, five years after settling in London, he died there, at the age of 52, without ever seeing the continent he had promised to ­deliver.

“Writing on Garvey has lately been a polemical tussle between two camps,” Grant concludes, “one that wants to skewer him as a charlatan and the other that seeks to elevate him to the status of a saint.” On the one hand, there is Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche’s judgment from 1940: “When the curtain dropped on the Garvey theatricals, the black man of America was exactly where Garvey had found him, though a little bit sadder, perhaps a bit poorer—if not wiser.” On the other hand is the fact that a future prime minister of Jamaica, Ed­ward Seaga, arranged in 1964 for Garvey’s remains to be returned for a funeral honoring him as the country’s first national ­hero.

But the forced choice Grant proposes is far too restricted. Himself of Jamaican heritage, Grant is unable to achieve a balanced perspective; though he is obviously aware of Garvey’s lunacies, his reservations are expressed only as snarky asides (as in the title of his book, a reference to that befeathered military hat that dominates the best-known photographs of Garvey). For the most part he writes as Garvey’s champion, praising his “genius,” snidely denigrating his opponents, even (most unforgiv­ably) comparing him to Gandhi. The principal value of 

 may be that it inadver­tently immerses the modern reader in the spirit of Garveyism: a murk of inchoate exhortation, discursive and digressive, lacking organization or ­over-­scrupulousness about facts. For example, Grant situates a Chicago beach on the Missouri River. Any­one seeking an intelligent and accurate account of Garvey and his movement must return to E. David Cronon’s superb 

 (1955), still the only scholarly account of Garvey’s life and ­movement.

From the time of his ascent, Garvey evoked conflicting responses, even from opponents such as the black newspaper 

, which wrote in an obituary editorial: “Had Garvey suc­ceeded in his undertakings, he would have been incontestably the greatest figure of the 20th century. Having failed, he is considered a fool.” Though he might have been a buffoon, a crook he was not: His endless and strident appeals for black people to purchase shares in the Black Star Line (“Any Negro not a stockholder in the BSL will be worse than a traitor”) were not designed to line his pockets but to support his crackpot fantasies of racial grandeur. (When one of the line’s steamships finally managed to take on coconuts as paid cargo, Garvey’s insistence that the vessel make unscheduled stops, that more people might marvel, ensured that the fruit rotted before it could be delivered.)

And had the man himself not appeared, the times might have created him. In the wake of the Great Migration of southern blacks to the North and their subsequent bitter discovery of a subtler segregation, in their disillusionment with the failed promise in Woodrow Wilson’s flatulent, if ringing, rhetoric of democracy, in their newfound determination to confront racial violence during the series of white mob actions of the “Red Summer” of 1919, “the mingled emotions of the race were bitterness, despair, and anger,” Johnson wrote. “There devel­oped an attitude of cynicism. . . . There developed also a spirit of defiance born of desperation.” These conditions called for a demagogue, and Garvey ­answered.

But he was “not the worst kind of dema­gogue,” Du Bois conceded. “If he had been simply a calculating scoundrel, he would carefully have skirted the narrow line between promise and performance and avoided as long as possible the inevitable catastrophe. But he believed in his program and he had a childish ignorance of the stern facts of the world into whose face he was flying.” Garvey certainly had the right enemies (colonialism, racial oppression, economic exploitation), and though his appeals for racial ­self-­respect could be shrill and silly (he bestowed endless titles on followers: “Baron of the Zambezi,” “Knights of the Nile,” “the Distinguished Service Order of Ethiopia”; even the humblest Garveyite was called “Fellowman of the Negro Race”), they could not be wholly despised at a time when Congress refused to outlaw ­lynching.

He may have been ­wrong-­headed, but at least he was sincere: Such has been the case made for Garvey. Just as he ignored the ancient dictum when he acted as his own law­yer in his ­mail ­fraud trial, far too many commentators cite his good intentions without acknowledging that they cobbled the pathway to perdition. Yet in the cold light of history, what did he accomplish, what good did he do? Garvey’s putative importance as precursor to racial ­self-­esteem is as greasy as that term has come to be; his concrete achievement is as evanescent as his steamship line. “You have been preying upon the gullibility of your own people,” a judge told Garvey. “You should have taken this $600,000 and built a hospital for colored people in this city instead of purchasing a few old boats. There is a form of paranoia which manifests itself in believing oneself to be a great man.”

Honky ­baiting, a favored tactic of black demagogues from Garvey to Jeremiah Wright, is a sorry substitute for reform. Equally barren is the assertion that Garvey, however demented, deserves praise for detesting the detestable. Such symbolic triumphs have so long been offered to black Americans that too many have substituted shadow for act (these days it is called “representation”) in a state of almost conscious denial. As the black scholar Kelly Miller said in the last century, “The Negro pays for what he wants and begs for what he needs.”

 is writing a biography of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry. 

"Negro With A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey"

 by Colin Grant, Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Michael Anderson on Marcus Garvey, "the most confounding figure in the history of black America." 

Self-Styled Moses

Has any decade of the American Century been written about more yet under­stood less than the Fifties? In both the popular and the scholarly minds, it exists as caricature, one held in contrast with an equally cartoonish conception of the Sixties: either a prison preceding liberation, or Eden before the Apocalypse. “When conservatives look back to the 1950s,” Alan Petigny writes, “they see an era of sexual reticence, a time when conservative Christianity was on the march, a halcyon era of order and tradition untarnished by the turmoil that would come. Conversely, liberals often vilify this time for its hypocrisy and repression.” More sensibly, scholars have recognized that one decade flowed into its successor, that the Fifties paved the way for the Sixties. Although Petigny would have it otherwise, 

 demonstrates the truth of the middle ­way.

Born from his doctoral dissertation, the book displays more bumptiousness than brilliance. American manners and mores “had been on the march for at least half a century,” he writes, and the pace accelerated ever more rapidly after World War II. This moment he portentously calls “the Permissive Turn”; it was, in fact, the final triumph of the social trend increasingly dominant since World War I (an event 

 ignores), urban modernism. Petigny essentially transposes contemporary culture wars back a ­half-­century. What he approves of is “open and democratic,” not to mention “modern”; what he disdains are prejudices such as “elitism and sexual prudery.” The first, no surprise, is “liberal,” the second “conservative”—labels now so greasy that they would scarcely have utility even with the careful definition Petigny neglects to provide. A pity, because his hours in the stacks have yielded a profusion of data that might facilitate some genuine insight into a pivotal ­era.

Anyone ­middle-­aged in 1950 had experienced three worldwide catastrophes—two world wars and an equally devastating economic collapse. Reconstruction was in order, for individuals as well as for society, and to replace the gods that had failed, Americans eagerly embraced ones that seemed more promising. As Petigny details, psychology was valorized: In 1955, the publishers of 

; alcoholism was converted from a sin to a disease; and the clergy set about “transforming theology into therapy.” Religion itself substituted appeasement for apocalypse; Brotherhood Week “explicitly cautioned celebrants against engaging in discussions of theology or church policy,” and Dwight D. Eisenhower famously advocated “deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”

Perhaps most tellingly, as described in Petigny’s ­best-­argued chapter, the status of women was ever on the rise. They were no longer junior partners in marriage. “As Pat Boone crooned in his 1958 hit, marriage was now a ­‘50-50 deal.’ ” A majority of Americans, both male and female, told pollsters they could endorse a woman as president, and “by the end of the 1950s, not only were there significantly more women serving as state legislators than at the end of World War II or at the close of the 1940s, but there were slightly more . . . than at the end of the 1960s.”

At the same time, however, Americans yearned for the simulacrum of stability. Indeed, a faux nostalgia for normalcy gripped the popular imagination, a desire to remember a world that never was. This was manifested most spectacularly in the Red Scare, but, perhaps not surprisingly, the urge to create an idealized past was visited particularly heavily upon the next generation. Despite the ­near-­hysterical condemn­ations of their music (rock ‘n’ roll “often plunges men’s minds into degrading and immoral depths,” declared Martin Luther King Jr.), their clothes (a juvenile court judge cited blue jeans as “a factor in sex delinquency”), and their deportment (“Going steady is a menace to the purity of our youth,” the principal of a Roman Catholic high school proclaimed), Petigny perceptively notes that “the rebelliousness of teenagers was not only tolerated by the larger culture, but was, to a large degree, sanctioned.” No surprise: The “rebellion” was epitomized by the pranks of Dennis the Menace; the putatively defiant heroes of 

 wound up “affirming the ideals of the larger society.”

Uneasy, unsettled, traveling in competing directions, the unacknowledged act uneasily conjoined with the camouflaging word: This is the prescription for anxiety, the situation Sigmund Freud considered the besetting condition of modern man (not “guilt,” as Petigny writes). Little wonder that the decade saw the finest works from cinema’s master of psychological subversion, Alfred Hitchcock—the Fifties were indeed the Age of Anxiety.

"The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965"

 by Alan Petigny, Cambridge University Press, 2009. 

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The 1950s are often perceived as a halcyon era of conformity, tradition, and sexual reticence, but a new book argues that anxieties surrounding the development of a "permissive society" were just as high then as they are now. 

Tame Rebellion

Muriel Spark is the mistress of mystification of postwar British fiction. She is best known for 

, her slim 1961 novel about the influence of an Edinburgh teacher on her young female pupils, which made her a literary star following its publication in 

 and adaptation for stage and screen. Born to working-class Edinburgh parents in 1918, Spark became a jet setter, with residences in London, New York, and Rome, before settling in Tuscany, where she died in 2006. She wrote 22 novels, in which the inexplicable and fantastic are presented as commonplace, with an airy, supercilious insinuation that the truth is unknown and unknowable. 

 book critic Michiko Kakutani once described Spark’s formula: “Take a self-enclosed community (of writers, schoolgirls, nuns, rich people, etc.) that is full of incestuous liaisons and fraternal intrigue; toss in a bombshell (like murder, suicide, or betrayal) that will ricochet dangerously around this little world; and add some allusions to the supernatural to ground these melodramatics in an old-fashioned context of good and evil.”

It is those allusions to the supernatural that have earned Spark critical cachet. She forms, with Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, “a grand triumvirate of Catholic-convert novelists,” in the words of her biographer, Martin Stannard. Like Waugh and Greene, Spark took Catholicism as a very sometime thing. All three seem to have embraced the religion for what might be called its secondary advantages, without the inconveniences of observance: faith without belief. (Tellingly, the older writers were early and consistent supporters of Spark’s work.) As Frank Kermode, the eminent English academic critic (and Spark partisan), once commented, “Mrs. Spark’s kind of religion seems bafflingly idiosyncratic.” She did not regularly attend Mass or go to confession. A remark by a character in her novel 

(1979) is emblematic of her glib snarkiness, both stylistic and theological: “I don’t know why the Catholic Church doesn’t stick to politics and keep its nose out of morals.” She proclaimed herself “only interested in God.”

The remark is revelatory, as is Stannard’s observation that Jesus “had never appealed” to Spark. But just as he fails to follow up on the odd phenomenon of a Christian who rejects Christ, Stannard ignores the other suggestive material about her life that he unearthed in a decade of research and writing. Undertaken at Spark’s invitation and with her cooperation, the book is an oddly subversive hagiography. Stannard engages in endless special pleading (on her sexual provocation: “As an attractive woman, she was plagued by men, particularly married men, who misread her gaiety as sexual invitation”), snide cheerleading (on Gore Vidal’s disparaging comments: “Failing powers? Mr. Vidal could think again”), and inane glorification (“To lesser mortals the near-permanent postal strike might have presented an obstacle. Muriel made other arrangements.” Having a friend act as courier—gosh, who’d a thunk it?). However, as a professor of modern literature at the University of Leicester and the author of a highly regarded two-volume biography of Evelyn Waugh, Stannard is too conscientious not to offer chapter and verse to undercut his overstated admiration for Spark. She is presented as madly self-centered, arrogant, a social-climbing snob (Ved Mehta, a fellow 

 writer, told Stannard, “She went through people like pieces of Kleenex”), and emotionally ruthless. Stannard’s book is a hard sell on a witch.

Like Graham Greene, Spark professed an eccentrically personal version of Catholicism. Kermode is surely correct to say that she “is a theological rather than a religious writer.” The question is what of substance her work has to say on matters spiritual. Her characteristic outré stylistic devices—“fun-house plots, full of trapdoors, abrupt apparitions, and smartly clicking secret panels,” in the words of her admirer John Updike—are putatively redeemed by intimations of the numinous. A typical Spark novel ends rather than concludes; irresolution is offered as a supernatural conundrum, with the author throwing dust in the reader’s eyes and calling it mystical. (The enduring popularity of 

 probably is due to Jay Presson Allen’s deft script adaptation, which junked Spark’s typically implausible Catholic transformation—Brodie’s nemesis, the student Sandy, winds up becoming a nun.) Contrast Spark with Flannery O’Connor, whose eccentrics and grotesques are vehicles for profound meditations on the mysteries of her Catholic faith. The differences in commitment, ethical engagement, and moral seriousness are stark.

Spark’s religious obscurantism is as one with her famously pitiless style. She observes what fools mortals be with a cool un-Puckish glee. This is the source of Spark’s acclaim as a comic satirist, but a very little of it goes a very long way, and it is chilling to read of real-life instances of her flippant heartlessness. Of her mentally unstable former husband, she recalled, “He became a borderline case, and I didn’t like what I found on either side of the border.” In place of Greene’s famous “sliver of ice” in the heart of a writer, Spark substituted a glacier.

Spark believed that it was “the will of God that she should be a Christian and a writer,” Stannard writes. Thus were justified her earthly transgressions: the abandonment (and eventual disinheritance) of her son, the rejection of friends, the arbitrary and outrageous demands on her publishers, the self-serving evasiveness. (“Sometimes she was unable to believe that she had ever said or done things that contradicted what she wanted to appear in the authorized version of her life,” Stannard writes, all too gingerly.) Spark’s autobiography gives little detail about her conversion—she became a Catholic in 1954—an omission Stannard, astonishingly, mimics. “Her pen was a key to an alternative reality from which the imperfect form of her own existence could be excluded,” he writes. “In this universe she was God, omnipotent, and, while there, she wanted not to be disturbed.”

However, truth will out, and can be found far closer to the ground. Spark was unwittingly self-revelatory when she told an interviewer in 1987 that the fundamental sin was “this propensity of the human spirit for self-justification.” Stannard repeatedly writes of Spark’s sense of threat, her need to protect herself against “emotional blackmail,” her “suspicion of betrayal.” He spews bombast about Spark’s “tortured life” (which, of course, transforms into triumph over adversity) but ignores what he himself presents.

For example, what role did Spark’s Jewish heritage play? Her adolescence, in the Edinburgh of the 1930s, was a “period of open anti-Semitism,” Stannard writes. “We were probably the only Jewish family in that whole area,” Spark’s brother told him. “You can feel it like you can feel the rain coming on.” Spark’s relation to this heritage was, not to put too fine a point on it, troubled: She repressed anti-Semitic slurs and disinherited her son over his adamant embrace of Judaism. (Stannard squeamishly acknowledges that the younger Spark may well be correct in his assertion that Muriel was Jewish not just on her father’s side, as she claimed, but also on her mother’s—traditionally, the side through which Jewish identity is passed on.)

Stannard writes that the death of Spark’s father, a year after the publication of 

, devastated her. “The sustaining fiction of her childhood—the supportive family—had died with her father. . . . The last shadow of its unqualified love had faded.” He also writes that for her the age of God the Father “was over.” She strove to become “immaculate, and thus free from the world’s attempts to impose guilt.” It would appear that Spark sought divine apotheosis to elude the all-too-human. Her desperate need for transcendence at any cost may well have been the source of her desperate need to validate herself as a writer (hence the book-a-year productivity) and her celebrated coolly observational writing style, as well as her restlessness, pretensions to divinity, frightened arrogance, and inability to make equitable human connections. But these attributes receive no consideration in this biography.

“Find the lady?” Stannard writes. “A difficult proposition when she was in ceaseless movement.” But the traveler takes herself wherever she goes. If Martin Stannard missed Muriel Spark, it was because he refused to look clearly at what he found.

 is finishing a biography of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry.

 by Martin Stannard, W.W. Norton 627 pp, 2010.

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Muriel Spark forms, with Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, “a grand triumvirate of Catholic-convert novelists."