Specialist in Variety

The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring.

--G.K. Chesterton

Charles Black, professor of jurisprudence at Yale Law School and one of the nation's leading constitutional scholars, is having trouble finding a publisher for the book he cares about most. He has no problem with his outpouring of legal prose. His handbook on impeachment, published last summer, has already sold 24,000 copies and is still going strong. W.W. Norton snapped up his newest book, on capital punishment, and rushed it into print just five weeks after getting the manuscript in September. Early next year, Yale University Press will publish a dialogue between Black and his childhood friend, Texas Congressman Bob Eckhardt, on the Constitution in the modern age. Any author would be gratified by such receptivity, but Black is a bit frustrated. No one seems to want to print his second volume of poems.

"You have to find some one who wants to lose money," he laments. "Those people do exist, but they are not numerous." Why the urgency? "Poetry is extremely important to me," says Black. "Except for the family, it is centrally important." His poetry for the most part is dense and mystical, and perhaps makes it easier to understand why Black suffered a nervous breakdown three years ago. In his first volume, Telescopes and Islands (1963), and in 250 poems published in small journals, he comments on aspects of man's agonies, simple pleasures and the contradictions in his relationship to nature. Some of the poems are lighter, however. A sample entitled "Reciprocation": "It would be odd/ If a spring took no joy/ In beholding hope gush freshly,/ Or if a basaltic mountain/ Did not rest on the comfort of watching/ Human patience in place."

Greek Start. If his poetry bears no resemblance to his lucid work as a constitutionalist, it is central to his view of teaching law. The legal profession, like others, increasingly demands undiverted specialization by its practitioners. Black deplores that fact. "Students need to be told that you can be a lawyer and not be crushed," he says. They need "to get the idea that people can do other things and still be a lawyer."

Black at 59 is a one-man symposium of "other things." Besides writing poetry, he paints well enough to have a dealer. ("He hasn't sold any of my works," says Black. "It was his suggestion that he become my dealer, not mine.") He is a music lover who each year organizes a Louis Armstrong memorial at the law school. The Texas-born scholar, who still has his drawl, also plays the trumpet and "a pretty good cowboy harmonica." A lifelong devotee of Chesterton's joy at being in the wrong place, Black began his scholarly career as a Greek major at the University of Texas. Why Greek? "My guess is that it was to be dramatic," he says now. "When people asked you and you told them, that sort of stopped the conversation."

After getting a master's degree in English, he "messed around for a few years, sat up late and talked a lot." Eventually he showed up at Yale to do graduate work in Old English, got bored and went over to the law school. His father had been a prominent attorney in Austin. Charles Jr. spent one year with a Wall Street firm before turning, in 1947, to teaching at Columbia and liberal legal activism. He helped bring the successful 1954 Brown desegregation suit and worked even harder on the subsequent series of sit-in cases in the South.

When he moved to Yale in 1956, he brought along a young equity student of his, Barbara Aronstein, whom he had married. They have three children. She is now working for a doctorate in legal history, and Black credits her with helping him change his life and move toward serious scholarship. "Read the entry in Who's Who. Nothing much turns up until I am 40," he notes.

"I got married a year before that." He did not change his fondness for variety though. With Grant Gilmore, he published a work on admiralty law 18 years ago that remains the standard text in the field; Black still teaches an admiralty course every other year. Otherwise, "I kind of teach one thing, then another." Currently that means a law school torts course and, in alternating years, a course on constitutional law or law and society for undergraduates.

Death Polemic. The Constitution, which he describes as "an intersection of law and politics," is still his first legal love. Over the years he has written dozens of articles and seven books on the nation's charters. A supporter of the Warren Court's constitutional interpretation, Black has moved a logical step farther in his new book, Capital Punishment: The Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake. Using "legal ways of thinking," he mounts a polemic against execution --intentionally timed to coincide with the Supreme Court's current consideration of a death-penalty case. "My aim," Black writes, "is to persuade [the reader] that two problems--mistake and arbitrariness in death-penalty cases--are not fringe problems, susceptible to being mopped up by minor refinements in concept and technique, but are at the very heart of the matter and are insoluble by any methods now known or now foreseeable."

Whether he is writing a book, poetry or one of his many lobbying letters to favored politicians, Black's words flow swiftly. His facility, success and extraordinary range have helped bring him "a rich, full life, but it hasn't been easy." The breakdown and a more recent prostate operation "left me with a feeling of the helplessness of people and how terrible and difficult the world is. Life is a hard proposition, and anybody who doesn't see it that way is closing his eyes." Considering Black's record, that observation sounds like the start of yet another intellectual excursion.

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