Emblems of Disquiet
WOIFF, GEOFFREY
Painting Black Cardboard Figures SOUL ON ICE By Eldridge Cleaver McGraw-Hill. 210 pp. $5.95. Revieived by DAVID EVANIER This collection of essays and open letters was written in Folsom State...
...Baldwin's "characters all seem to be fucking and sucking in a vacuum...
...He considers Baldwin a prisoner of his lust for white men, and compares him unfavorably with Richard Wright...
...Richard Wright "reigns supreme for his profound political, economic and social reference...
...Revieived by DAVID EVANIER This collection of essays and open letters was written in Folsom State Prison, California, where the author served time first on a marijuana conviction, and later (the period the book was written) on a rape charge...
...He even includes a poem...
...The style throughout the book is pop-Leftism, a mixture of sex and revolution characteristic of the New Left around the world...
...Cleaver restricts his own potential, confining his writing to a series of machine-gun blasts that capture the mood of the black militants...
...of course, Mailer: "There's a shit-storm coming...
...Cleaver wrote to her: "It is not that we are making each other up and it is not ourselves alone who are involved in what is happening to us...
...For Baldwin, "the only way out . . . psychologically is to embrace Africa, the land of his fathers, which he refuses to do...
...To A White Girl": "I love you/ Because you're white,/ Not because you're charming/ Or bright...
...In an essay in Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin observed, "the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms...
...Make love and carry the banner of the Vietcong high...
...Addressing him as "Sugar," he says that Baldwin's character in Another Country, Rufus Scott, "the weak craven-hearted ghost," is to Bigger Thomas in Native Son, "the black rebel of the ghetto and a man," what Baldwin is to "the fallen giant," Wright...
...A young Negro prisoner who could write that he is "hard-up enough to suck my grandmother's old withered tits," and is looking for "a blacker-meaner-keener Malcolm X" was bound to catch the admiration of the California New Leftists...
...A Black Muslim who renounced Elijah Muhammed's teachings to join Malcolm X, Cleaver pronounces the white world doomed...
...He reveals an innate gift for...
...It is really a complex movement taking place of which we are mere parts...
...Your whiteness ' Is a silky thread/ Snaking through my thoughts/ In redhot patterns/ of lust and desire...
...Indeed, there is enough street humor and desperate candor here to titillate any middle-class revolutionary—and Cleaver is careful to combine the raw stuff with a Socialism that is about as convincing as Evergreen Review's, subway advertisements: that red-bordered portrait of Che Guevera, with the proclamation: "The spirit of Che Lives in Evergreen...
...It reminds me of the great days of the past . . . one of the best cultural critics now writing...
...Referring to the rape, he blandly contends, "the blood of Vietnamese peasants has paid off all my debts...
...The machine gun on the corner,' wrote Richard Wright, 'is the symbol of the 20th century.' " And...
...Cleaver's heroes, of course, are Castro, Guevera, Mao Tse-tung, Ben Bella, Nasser, Ho Chi Minh, Stokely Carmichael, and Chou En-lai, among others (He also includes Martin Luther King Jr., but steadily demeans him in the book, referring to him at one point as a latter-day Booker T. Washington...
...Differentiating good white people from bad, however, he sees young white radicals joining Negroes in building a Socialism in the United States that is similar to "third world" Marxism...
...In the course of her jail visits, Miss Axelrod and Cleaver fell in love...
...In the February issue of Encounter, Horst Krueger describes this combination as it appears in West Germany: "the era of Sex and Socialism...
...The several letters between them reprinted in this volume are somewhat reminiscent of the Rosenbergs' prison correspondence: self-conscious, cerebral communication by two people who see themselves as "historical forces" rather than human beings...
...About the white woman who caused Emmett Till's murder by accusing him of flirting with her, he writes: "I looked at her picture again and again, and in spite of everything and against my will and the hate I felt for the woman and all that she represented, she appealed to me...
...More interesting is Cleaver's obsession with white women: "It intensified my frustrations to know that I was indoctrinated to see the white woman as more beautiful and desirable than my own black woman...
...We represent historical forces and it is really those forces that are coalescing and moving toward each other...
...At the close of this essay on Baldwin, Cleaver points to the prophets: " 'Will the machine gunners please step forward,' said Leroi Jones in a poem...
...Eros is on the Left and beautiful is our youthful rebellion...
...While at Folsom, the author was discovered by Beverly Axelrod, a lawyer, and by the editors of Ramparts, who decided he was, in the words of Maxwell Geismar, "one of the distinctive new literary voices to be heard...
...Cleaver adds to this a brashly violent note and a sure literary talent...
...I hate you/ Because you're white./ Your white meat/ Is nightmare food . . ." The subject recurs, but Cleaver never really deals with it in depth, although sexual love for whites is the basis on which he condemns James Baldwin...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 7
