GATES OPENS LITERARY DEBATE ON AFRICAN-AMERICAN ICONS.

Byline: Michiko Kakutani The New York Times

Title: ``Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man''

Author: Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Data: Illustrated. 226 pages, Random House; $22.

Our rating: Four Stars

The title of Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s eloquent new book, ``Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man,'' is, of course, a play on the Wallace Stevens poem ``Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,'' and Gates uses the phrase both to pose an epistemological problem, as Stevens did, and to raise some vexing questions about identity and race.

Indeed, the central theme running through these otherwise disparate profiles is a variation on the one that Ralph Ellison addressed in ``Invisible Man'': How does race heighten the perennial American question of self-definition; how does it, in effect, color both white perceptions of African-Americans, and African-American perceptions of self?

In this volume, the versatile Gates, who is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and chairman of the Afro-American studies department at Harvard University, is writing in his journalistic mode. ``Thirteen Ways'' does not aspire to the scholarly latitudes of Gates' first book, ``The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism''; it is closer, in tone and style, to ``Colored People,'' his engaging 1994 memoir.

In contrast to literary criticism, Gates suggests, ``writing a profile is in part an exercise in toning down your stentorian certainties; people benefit from a slightly more gingerly approach than texts.'' Once ``you start approaching people as cultural homework,'' he adds, ``you'd better hang it up.''

In writing about eight prominent African-Americans (James Baldwin, Albert Murray, Bill T. Jones, Colin Powell, O.J. Simpson, Louis Farrakhan, Harry Belafonte and Anatole Broyard), Gates not only displays his fluency and charm as an essayist but also shows off his skills as a reporter.

His portrait of Powell, which originally appeared in the New Yorker, includes some remarkably candid quotes from the Rev. Jesse Jackson about his rivalry with the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and also situates that rivalry within a tradition of contrasting power pairs in African-American history: Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass; W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington; Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Other profiles read more like short stories: artful narratives about kinship and competition, succinct parables about the invention and loss of identity. One chapter traces the nearly 50-year friendship of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, their fluctuating fortunes within the movie business and their respective attitudes toward politics.

The chapter on James Baldwin charts his sheepish repudiation of his earlier views in a vain effort to appease his radical critics, while the chapter on Anatole Broyard, who was a book critic for The New York Times, relates the paradoxical story of a man who repudiated his racial heritage in an effort to forge an identity as a writer, and who in the process misplaced the ability to finish the magnum opus he'd always wanted to write.

Although Gates pulls no punches in these pieces - of Baldwin's efforts to ingratiate himself with a younger generation of radicals, he writes: ``It read as weakness, the ill-disguised appeasement of a creature whose day had come and gone'' - he tempers his assessments with a sympathetic intelligence and a determination to see the larger implications of his subjects' stories. He also leavens his analysis with personal asides and ruminations that sketch in his own efforts to grapple with the issue of race.

Gates tells us about the ambivalent feelings he experienced as a Yale student in the late '60s being asked for donations from the Panthers: ``You handed them money because they were working for a better tomorrow; because they were strong, proud and black; because they had a wardrobe you could only dream about; because if you dared to walk past them, they'd demand, `Where you gonna be when the revolution comes, handkerchief-head?' and images of the tumbrel would pass before your eyes.''

He tells us about the ill-founded expectations he brought to a visit to Louis Farrakhan's house for the first time: ``I wasn't expecting the Death Star, exactly, but I wouldn't have been surprised to see a formidable security detail: the Fruit of Islam patrolling the roof and gates with automatic weapons; perhaps a few attack dogs roaming the grounds.''

And he tells us about the impact that Watts had on him at the age of 14, when news of the riots reached his integrated summer camp: Watching himself being watched by all the white campers, he says, he ``experienced that strange combination of power and powerlessness that you feel when the actions of another black person affect your own life, simply because you both are black.''

In essay after essay in this volume, questions of authenticity (of being black enough) and ``the burden of representation'' (``the homely notion that you represent your race, thus that your actions can betray your race or honor it'') surface as issues in the lives of Gates' subjects.

Powell is quoted as saying he doesn't want ``to be the poster child for the brothers, or for guilty white liberals.'' Harry Belafonte, hailed by Look magazine in 1957 as ``the first Negro matinee idol in our entertainment history,'' finds himself resenting his status as a ``bridge Negro,'' while at the same time receiving rebukes from African-Americans for marrying a white woman.

As for O.J. Simpson, Gates argues that he became ``an empty vessel'' filled with meaning by African-Americans and whites alike who refused to see his case as sui generis and instead ``racialized'' it, turning it into yet another chapter in the ``binary discourse of accusation and counteraccusation, of grievance and countergrievance, of victims and victimizers'' that has dominated the analysis of race in this country.

Each man in this book, Gates observes, rages in his own way ``against the dread requirement to represent; against the demands of `authenticity,' '' but at the same time, all are ``people who have borne some freight of being iconic.''

``Railing against something doesn't mean you've escaped from it,'' he writes. ``The grand theme of your career may be that the burden of representation is an illusion - a paradigm, par excellence, of ideological mauvaise foi - but that will only heighten your chagrin when you realize that it follows you everywhere like your own shadow. It isn't a thing of your making, and it won't succumb to your powers of unmaking - not yet, anyway.''

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Photo: (1--2) In Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s new book, Harry Belafonte, left, resents his status as a ``bridge Negro,'' and retired Gen. Colin Powell doesn't want ``to be the poster child for the brothers, or for guilty white liberals.''