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Books by
Eldridge Cleaver
Soul on Ice /
Post-Prison Writings and
Speeches / Target
Zero; A Life in Writing /
Conversation with Eldridge Cleaver
Being Black /
Education and Revolution /
Eldridge Cleaver /
Eldridge Cleaver Is Free
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Maxwell
Geismar's "Introduction"
to the 1968 Edition of Soul on
Ice This book, written in prison by a young black
American (or Afro-American), is one of the discoveries of the
1960s. In a literary epoch marked by a prevailing mediocrity of
expression, a lack of substantial new talent, a kind of
spiritual slough after the great wave of American writing from
the I 920s to the 1940s, Eldridge Cleaver's is one of the
distinctive new literary voices to be heard. It reminds me of
the great days of the past. It has echoes of Richard Wright's Native
Son, just as its true moral affinity is with one of the few
other fine books of our period, the Autobiography of Malcolm X,
and as it represents in American terms the only comparable
approach to the writings of Frantz Fanon.
In a curious way Cleaver's book has definite
parallels with Fanon's Black Skin White Masks. In both
books the central problem is of identification as a black
soul which has been "colonized"-more subtly perhaps in
the United States for some three hundred years, but perhaps even
more pervasively-by an oppressive white society that projects
its brief, narrow vision of life as eternal truth. Eldridge
Cleaver very fittingly opens these Letters from Prison with the
section called "On Becoming" in 1954, when he was
eighteen years old.
The Supreme Court had just outlawed
segregation; he was in Folsom Prison, California, on a marijuana
charge; he would be sent back to prison again for what he
describes as rape-on-principle. There is a kind of adolescent
innocence--the innocence of genius--in these early letters, just
as later there is savage irony and a profound deadpan humor
about the white man's civilization in the twentieth-century
United States.
Cleaver is simply one of the best cultural
critics now writing, and I include in this statement both the
formal sociologists and those contemporary fictionists who have
mainly abandoned this province of literature for the cultivation
of the cult of sensibility. (I am aware also of what may be
considered excessive praise in this introduction; in that case I
can only beg the reader to stop reading me and start directly
with Cleaver.)
As in Malcolm X's case, here is an
"outside" critic who takes pleasure in dissecting the
deepest and most cherished notions of our personal and social
behavior; and it takes a certain amount of courage and a
"willed objectivity" to read him. He rakes our
favorite prejudices with the savage claws of his prose until our
wounds are bare, our psyche is exposed, and we must either fight
back or laugh with him for the service he has done us. For the
"souls of black folk," in W. E. B. Du Bois' phrase,
are the best mirror in which to see the white American self in
mid-twentieth century.
It takes a certain boldness on Cleaver's
part, also, to open this collection of essays with the section
not merely on rape but on the whole profound relationship of
black men and white women. There is a secret kind of sexual
mysticism in this writer which adds depth and tone to his social
commentary; this is a highly literary and imaginative mind
surveying the salient aspects of our common life.
There follow the Four Vignettes--on Watts, on
the Muslims, on Catholicism and Thomas Merton, and on the heroic
prison teacher called Lovdjieff. Here we begin to feel the reach
and depth of Eldridge Cleaver's mind on emotional and
philosophical issues as well as historical and social ones--and
yes, "heroic," a note barely sounded in contemporary
fiction, is not inappropriate for certain parts of this deeply
revolutionary collection of essays.
After a series of religious experiences in
prison, the young Cleaver became a Muslim convert, then a Muslim
preacher of extraordinary eloquence and conviction, and then a
firm follower of Malcolm X. Through this process he regained his
previously alienated and splintered self-image as a child of the
California black ghetto; and from this point began the
remarkable process of self-analysis, self-education and
self-expression described in the pages of this book.
The essay called "Initial Reactions on
the Assassination of Malcolm X," written in 1965, is a
document of prime importance for an understanding of the outcast
black American soul today; it illuminates all the long hot
summers of rioting, violence, and "senseless"
destruction.
Here Cleaver unites the militant black
resistance movement in the United States with the currents of
world revolution in a way which may come as a shock to many
white Americans of liberal persuasion and spiritual good-will.
Yet it is so, and the sooner we try to
understand it the better, and Eldridge Cleaver can help us in
this process. "We shall have our manhood. We shall have it
or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain
it"--and some parts of the American earth have already been
leveled by this prophetic spirit of wrath--and human
dignity.
But it is the part of the book called
"Blood of the Beast," and such pieces as "The
White Race and Its Heroes," that I find of primary
importance, and of the greatest literary value. Describing
himself as an "Ofay Watcher," Cleaver describes this
historical period and this American culture in terms of the most
astringent accuracy, the most ruthless irony, and the most
insistent truthfulness. He reminds us of all the simple verities
that decades of Cold War distortion and hypocrisy have almost
wiped from our historical record--our historical consciousness.
The book is a handsome account of those years
in the early sixties when the Civil Rights campaign stirred up a
national psyche that had been unnaturally comatose, slothful,
and evasive since the McCarthyite trauma. There is an atmosphere
of turbulence in these essays, moving from the advent of the
Beats and Jack Kerouac's On The Road to LeRoi
Jones' revolutionary verses and then back to the Abolitionists
(so scorned and despised by the Southern revisionist historians
of the modern epoch), to Harriet Beecher Stowe and to that
famous Fourth of July peroration for the slave race by Frederick
Douglass in 1852.
In the concluding part of this book it seems
that Eldridge Cleaver has reached his own spiritual
convalescence, his healed spirit (no longer racist or narrowly
nationalist), and his mature power as a writer--and how those
pages do sparkle! The essay "Lazarus, Come Forth," on
Negro celebrities and on boxing as the virility symbol of the
American masses, and on Muhammad Ali in particular, is a
beauty. Here Cleaver begins to touch on all aspects of American
culture with a sure touch and a clear vision.
"Notes on a Native Son" is the best
analysis of James Baldwin's literary career I have read; and
while Cleaver calmly says things that no white critic could
really dare to say, there is not a trace of petty artistic
jealousy or self-vanity in his discussion--such as that, for
example, which marked Baldwin's own repudiation of his former
mentor, Richard Wright.
The essay called "Rallying Round the
Flag" gives us the plain, hard, truthful Afro-American view
of the Vietnam war which Martin Luther King, just lately, has
corroborated--it is in fact the world view of our aberrant
national behavior in southeast Asia. But just as this volume
opens on the theme of love, just as Eldridge Cleaver never
misses the sexual core of every social (or racial) phenomenon,
so it closes on it.
There are touching and illuminating letters
to the California civil-rights lawyer Beverly Axelrod, who, awed
by Cleaver's talent as all of us were who first encountered it
several years ago, succeeded in obtaining his release from
Folsom Prison after nine years. There is the section of the book
called "The Primeval Mitosis," close to a kind of
Laurentian sexual mysticism again, which bodies forth such
engaging social types as the Supermasculine Menial and the
Ultrafeminine Doll: the sexual-social myth Cleaver has invented
for the second-class black male (all body, no brain) and the
pure white Southern lady, say, languishing and swooning her days
away. These are the exotic myths and fabricated legends of a
racial caste system embodied in a hypocritical class society.
These are the satiric fantasies hovering around something which
might be called the "essential miscegenation" as the
missing key, the un-thinkable solution to the American race
problem.
I had forgotten to mention the wonderfully
ironic descriptions of the Twist as the social symptom of the
new age of dawning racial equality. Here, as with the Beatles
and Rock n' Roll, when Eldridge Cleaver moves into the area of
mass entertainment in the United States, he is as close as he
ever comes to an open laughter at the white man's antics; just
as in the concluding apostrophe from the Black Eunuch to the
Black Queen--to the fertile black womb of all history--he
reminds us how civilization has always mocked human gaiety. M.G..
Harrison, New York
June 1967 * * *
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| 1968 Reviews of Soul on Ice
" . . .beautifully written by a man with a formidably analytical
mind. . . . makes you twist and flinch because he is no damned
gentleman. he throws light on the dark areas we wish he would leave
alone . . . brilliant . . ." --Julian
Mayfield, THE NATION
"He is full of Christian care, Christian grief
and disappointment, Christian resignation, Christian messianic
toughness, and hope" --Robert Coles THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY
"Cleaver's moral energy, and his understanding of
its vulnerability and source, is unimpeachable."--Geoffrey Wolff, SAN
FRANCISCO EXAMINER AND CHRONICLE
" . . . an exceptional volume both in what it
says and how the author came to say it . . ." --Thomas Lask. THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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updated 25 February 2008 |
