‘The Day & Night Books of Mardou Fox’
By Nisi Shawl
Rosarium Publishing, 166 Pages

Mardou Fox is the name of an African American character in a novella by Jack Kerouac, “The Subterraneans.” She had a real-life model, Alene Lee (1931-91), who left behind no written response to the charges that Kerouac maligned her in his fiction. Nisi’s Shawl’s novel, written in the form of Fox’s diary, is not so much a rebuttal to Kerouac as it is a compelling account of how difficult and yet inspiring it may have been for a Black woman to figure in the lives of the white Beat writers who did not know what to make of her.

Ms. Shawl’s Mardou is 11 years old when she begins to write her diary — the same age as Sylvia Plath, but without Plath’s encouraging mother, who had made a present of a diary book to her daughter. Mardou, born Marlene Todd, has to keep her diary secret, not only because her mother would not understand the need to write but also because Mardou, who has named herself, has night visions of a world “over the fence” that is, in effect, a world of possibility that is denied to her because of her race and sex.

Mardou writes simply and eloquently about “moving stuff around with my mind.” She is keenly observant. When a white guidance counselor looks over Mardou’s shoulder, not directly in her eyes, Mardou knows: “With white people that means they’re lying.” White people often try to fool Mardou, which is a fact of life for her and not the subject of protest. She is used to white people intimidating her, or, as she says, going “all white on me.”

It is only to her diary that Mardou can confess her hopes, fears, and suspicions. She is impressive because she does not write out of pique or a sense of grievance. She defines herself as a “true-born intellectual, the equivalent of Monk or Adderley any day,” referring to the jazz legends Thelonius Monk and “Cannonball” Adderley. But she has to hide that diary and be careful to keep her William Blake-like visions to herself, lest she be greeted as mentally ill like her sister Clarice.

Raphael and Leo, who have been taken to be loosely derived from Allen Ginsburg and Kerouac, are smitten with her and yet relegate her to the realm of their own obsessions. Leo rips off her work and tells her what he’d done “was for the best. I’d never make it on my own, I had a spark, special talent, but a colored like me wasn’t gonna, had no chance of, would try and try and try again and always always fail to succeed.” She tries to rationalize what he’s done, saying, “I suppose he’s right. It’s for the best. This way I’ll at least get some attention.”

Such moments are heartbreaking, but Mardou does not rant about them. Instead, she simply says: “I wish I didn’t care. I wish I could sleep.” That understatement of what is an overwhelming blow to her ambition is all the more powerful for being delivered without complaint. Sometimes, her asides are quite droll: “being with most whites is a truly educational experience.” 

The title of one of Mardou’s books says it all: “My Blues Ain’t Like Yours.” The peripatetic Leo cannot be relied on: “He will travel the country back and forth at the drop of a baseball cap,” and he reappears, Mardou knows, when he wants to bed her. 

Mardou is forever on the edge of the white world, mentioning, for example, friends and a half sister who move into the Barbizon Plaza, once the haunt of Sylvia Plath and Grace Kelly and other artistic hopefuls that by 1963 “apparently now includes whites if they’re queers too.”

Even when Mardou is offered a contract from a bookstore/publisher, Open Books (an allusion to City Lights Bookstore), and stays in the elegant Villa Rose Motel, the establishment is surprised to discover that she is Black, “but this being North Beach they mostly managed to cover that up. Mostly.”

Biographical novelists usually try a lot harder to work at the details that make a novel look like a biography, but Nisi Shawl transports the genre of biographical fiction into fantasy bordering on science fiction, and she does it with a light, sly style that is brilliant, beautiful, and profound.

Mr. Rollyson, author of “Sylvia Plath Day by Day,” based on her diaries, writes about biographical fiction in “Reading Biography.”