The Three Burials of Alston Anderson

By LAWRENCE DOWNES

Alston Anderson was buried on Saturday for the second time — or the third, if you count the slow sinking that constituted his long but unrewarded life. He was an African-American short-story writer, poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent three years in the Army in World War II and three months of 1955 at Yaddo, the writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. He studied philosophy at Columbia and the Sorbonne.

He had sharp talent and famous friends: Richard Wright, Terry Southern, Robert Graves. His work was chosen for anthologies of “jazz fiction” and of the best “Negro writers.” He had a story in The New Yorker and an interview with Nelson Algren in The Paris Review.

What he didn’t have were money, lasting acclaim and, evidently, family. When he died in Manhattan on July 15, 2008, at 84, no one claimed his remains. The government buried him in the potter’s field at Hart Island.

The next two-and-a-half years would have extended into forever but for a program that tracks down the remains of indigent veterans and provides them proper military burials. That was how Mr. Anderson came to join 19 other veterans buried on Saturday at Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island.

No one could say much about them. The eulogist did what he could, reading everyone’s name and years of service, and then a poem about going to the arms of Jesus. He did not say that the coffin in the first row on his far right held the author of “Lover Man,” stories of Southern black life, told in a voice jazz-inflected and rural, and a novel, “All God’s Children.”

Courtesy of the NY Times

I found him myself only through chance. Googling “Anderson Alston” from the funeral press release led to the suspicion that the name was backward. The author’s Internet trail matched the soldier’s exactly: born 1924, Panama Canal Zone; lived in Kingston, Jamaica, and Oxford, N.C.; 1943 to 1946 in the Army, private to master sergeant; then Germany, France, New York.

On Friday, I e-mailed Micki McGee, a Fordham University professor who wrote a book about Yaddo that led to an exhibition at the New York Public Library. She called back instantly. She told me that it had been Mr. Anderson’s sad file that convinced her to tell the Yaddo story. “I think I’m going to cry,” she said when she heard about his reburial.

Mr. Anderson was at Yaddo with James Baldwin. He left under a cloud; notes in his files tell of bad behavior and his mixing with “objectionable characters.” He was dunned for months after for an unpaid $13.36 phone bill.

He tried to explain. “I find it impossible,” he wrote to Yaddo’s executive director, Elizabeth Ames, “to work eight hours a day and write at the same time.” He survived on “baby-sitting and odd typing jobs, just enough to provide one meal a day. It would be a very simple thing for me to get a job and pay my debts, and I’m very much aware that this is what I should do. But I feel that once I make such a compromise I’ll become an $80-a-week clerk and that will be the end of me. I am determined that that shall not happen.”

He changed addresses six times that year, and later told Graves that he nearly froze to death that winter. His request to return to Yaddo was rejected. “Lover Man,” however, got great reviews. “Perfect ear, warm heart,” said The Times. “First-class,” said Time magazine.

Graves wrote its foreword. He said he couldn’t imagine how his young friend with the “nervous smile, tall, spare body and soft voice,” had been a master sergeant. “Behaviour too mild, sense of humour too keen, habits too vague,” he wrote. But an officer Mr. Anderson was, at 21. He served in Bandar Shahpur, Iran, editing the post newspaper.

I don’t know the rest of his story, but I saw the last bit of it. It was in a big white tent, on a gray day after a snowstorm. The honor guards maneuvered 20 coffins with crisp dignity. Veterans, in embroidered jackets and baseball caps, stood at attention and saluted and applauded. Politicians gave speeches; this consecration far above their power to add or detract.

Mr. Anderson, like the others, had an engraved nameplate on his silver coffin and was given a flag, a volley of gunfire, taps. Twenty men, received an overdue wave of respect and admiration, even though it was too late for them to accept it, and nobody knew who they were.