Poitier Defies Conventional Measurement

Inspired by a performance by the actress Anna DeVere Smith a few years ago, Sidney Poitier has longed to perform a similar solo evening, to explore a “long-forgotten, unfulfilled urge” to take bold risks with his life and his craft. It would serve, he writes, “to engage compulsion on all matters of unfinished business. . . . To look around inside myself at roadways that had once seemed to lead nowhere in particular and ask why they had been dead-ends.”

In some ways, “The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography” is a deeply nostalgic revisiting of the past. Its most vivid pages recall the actor’s earliest years on Cat Island in the Bahamas, a natural paradise in which even unmitigated poverty was of trivial concern beside the greater values of parental love--and unsparing discipline--in a natural environment which called to both the adventurer and the risk-taker in the growing boy.

“The measure of a man,” Poitier learned indelibly from his father, “is how well he provides for his children.” It was a lesson that would cause him much anguish later in life, at the time of his divorce.

Until age 10, when the Poitier family was forced to leave for Nassau in search of work, he “never got a fix” on racial identity. With the culture shock of urban Nassau, however, and later Miami, he had to face a “long-established, nonnegotiable position on the color of skin, which declared me unworthy of human consideration, then ordered me to embrace the notion of my unworthiness. My reply was, ‘Who me? Are you . . . crazy? Me? You’re talking to me?’ ” (Sensitive readers should be warned of Poitier’s occasional, always purposeful, use of uncensored language.)

As one who has never had to deal with these issues in my life experience, I stand in awe of Poitier’s lifelong, emphatic refusal to be categorized by social class or color. His response was “not simply to be good, but to be better than.”

With the unwavering sense of dignity and worth he attributes to his upbringing, he brought this principle to the early days of his acting career, declining any role he deemed demeaning, no matter what the professional advancement or financial reward.

In this, too, he was ready to take risks, but the risks were tempered by the discipline and the commitment he brought to the practice of his craft: “Never leave home,” he vowed during those difficult early days in the New York theater--the emphasis is his--”without a fixed commitment.”

A part of the tempering process was no doubt an inner rage against racially based injustice, freely acknowledged and expressed, which Poitier turned into the sheer steel of determination; a part, too, was the battle with success itself, especially at the time, at the height of his career, when he felt the bitter lash of black criticism for not being “more angry and confrontational.”

“I was being taken to task,” he writes, “for playing exemplary human beings”--the hallmark, surely, of his individual distinction as an actor. (For those interested in this aspect of his life, the book is filled with fascinating detail about Poitier’s films and theatrical performances, along with cameo appearances by friends and mentors, particularly from the lively cultural scene of Harlem at mid-century.)

So why does Poitier call this actor’s memoir a “spiritual autobiography”? In part because its focus is on the human values he has learned and tested in the course of his more than 70 years on Earth. But in part, too, because he wants to share the spiritual beliefs--not conventionally religious, to be sure, but hard-earned and deeply held--to which the last chapters of his book are devoted.

“I’ll say that I believe in God if you press me to the wall,” he writes, preferring nonetheless to ascribe this power to “a very organic, immeasurable consciousness of which we’re a part--a force so powerful that I’m incapable of comprehending its power through the puny instrument of the human mind.” His spiritual work is “to focus beyond the self,” to “sense the connection of it all, and my place within it all, but only by removing myself from the center.”

Approaching his own latter years and watching old friends die as he confronts his demons, Poitier indulges informally in philosophical speculation, as though in a favorite rocker on the back porch. Academics will surely find something to scoff at in his simplicity and directness, but this man’s authenticity is earned by the life he describes and asks to be credited in the unpretentious terms in which it is offered.

If I had one wish, it would be for a greater measure of acceptance, a relaxation of the discipline with which he has learned to address life’s challenges, a greater kindness for himself: “We’re all imperfect,” he concludes, “and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.” This strong and admirable man deserves a greater peace.

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Peter Clothier is the author of “While I Am Not Afraid: Secrets of a Man’s Heart.”