The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams
A chronicle of nervousness and dissatisfaction among the Black literati
By John A. Williams, Foreword by Ishmael Reed, Introduction by Merve Emre
491 Pages. Library of America. $15.95.
Let me end my extended absence from this newsletter, and start this new year, with a bitter, cynical novel, one that contains a nice little passage that condemns me and my project here at New Releases:
What was wrong with Wilkinson, Max suddenly realized as he took another Scotch from the tray, was that he liked names. He thought they gave medals for reading Stendhal and Giraudoux and Auden and Henry Adams. He was a walking encyclopedia of famous and obscure writers, the good ones. (“Honest, Max, that Andreyev is something else!”)
It is from an essay by one of those good ones – Auden, to be precise – that we get a passage that sums up a good portion of the atmosphere of The Man Who Cried I Am:
Literary gatherings, cocktail parties and the like, are a social nightmare because writers have no “shop” to talk. Lawyers and doctors can entertain each other with stories about interesting cases, about experiences, that is to say, related to their professional interests but yet impersonal and outside themselves. Writers have no impersonal professional interests. The literary equivalent of talking shop would be writers reciting their own work at each other, an unpopular procedure for which only very young writers have the nerve.
The Man Who Cried I Am is set in this social nightmare. Its main characters are novelists who rarely talk about their novels, and seem to think about them only occasionally; instead they get drunk, sleep around, maneuver for fellowships and jobs in journalism, and attend literary parties where they talk about all these things, as well as politics.
In this case, the social nightmare is made worse because the novelists are mostly Black Americans, part of the small group who have had some success among the major publishers of the postwar US. The main point of view character is Max Reddick, and his major friend/rival in the Black literary world is Harry Ames. Harry Ames shares many similarities with Richard Wright, and Max Reddick is based partially on Chester Himes, as well, possibly, on William Gardner Smith (both men wrote novels about a love affair between a Black American soldier and a white European woman during World War Two),1 but whose career largely resembles John A. Williams himself.
The Man Who Cried I Am was published in 1967, and its story takes place over the preceding decades: the narrative starts in the 1930s, soon after Max Reddick has published his first novel, and it continues through the ups and downs of his career as a writer. He takes a job at a Black newspaper, serves in Italy during World War 2, reports on the civil rights movement for a leading national newsmagazine (a fictionalized version of Time or Newsweek), lives in Paris with Harry Ames for a while, then reports on the newly independent African countries. During this time, he writes a few more novels, though we don’t hear a lot about them (none is a bestseller).
The Man Who Cried I Am was, however, a bestseller. Chester Himes boldly described it as “a milestone in American literature, the only milestone (legitimate milestone) produced since Native Son.” That quote appears both on the back of the LOA edition and in Merve Emre’s introduction, but although the title of The Man Who Cried I Am points to existential anguish, it almost never approaches the level of rage and fury that appears in Native Son. Emre is right to point out that while the prevailing mood is “paranoia,” it is a paranoia that results in “neither mania nor agitation, but weariness, mingled notes of compromise and surrender.”
Yes, while The Man Who Cried I Am has always been best known for its climactic, almost apocalyptic ending – I won’t give it away, for it is an ending that benefits from its surprise (don’t read Emre or Reed’s introductions first!) – the distinguishing feature of the novel before its final chapters is how anticlimactic it is. Max Reddick experiences several misfortunes, some quite grievous, and he travels across the world, but it is hard to tell what his driving motivation is, what his goal in life is. He has some modest success as both a writer and a journalist, but his conflict always seems to be with that very “weariness” that comes from the paranoia of the Black experience – or more exactly, the experience of the Black American writer.
The narrative does not propel forward; it circles around themes and obsessions without anyone dominating the others. Characters are introduced and then forgotten about for a hundred pages, or simply just forgotten about. Dramatic events occur, but after their initial shock they are slowly absorbed by Reddick and others until they become the background noise of life. The prose, too, though it has moments of tender beauty, is generally written in the short, cutting remarks of a time-crunched, world-weary New Yorker:
Drugs were starting their poisonous flow through Harlem, and, rumor had it, Jenkins was hell on pushers and junkies. Max nodded briefly. Black sonofabitch, he thought. Like I don’t have any business up here. Like they were all waiting for me to leave Harlem for good.
The Man Who Cried I Am relies very heavily on this kind of internal monologue which resembles not really a stream of consciousness, but the kind of prose a writer would produce if asked to produce a stream of consciousness on the fly. There are the journalistic observations (the “poisonous flow” of drugs), casual, conversational cliches (“rumor had it”), and street talk (“Black sonofabitch”). This is a limited style, and while I am glad there are occasional breaks from it, it works well within its limits: it gives the novel a momentum, and demonstrates the nervous energy that runs through what might otherwise seem to be the listless actions of the characters.
In his novel’s best moments, Williams captures the mood of brief and particular eras in American history. There is a short section where Reddick reports on the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, who ran as the Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 election with the aim of pushing FDR liberalism firmly to the left. The campaign is insignificant to the plot, and anyway Henry Wallace (not to be confused with the segregationist politician George Wallace) has basically been forgotten in American historical memory, but Williams’ description is not to be forgotten:
Wallace, the thin man with the long face, the stiff, sweeping mop of hair, the toothy, embarrassed, adolescent grin, attracted young people – and, Max noted at the time, the younger veterans of the war. There was a certain vibrancy to the campaign, the kind only underdogs wage [...] There were spotlights in a thousand high school auditoriums that cut through the darkness with the speed and force of a knife wounding the eye to disclose Henry Agard Wallace.
I really like this description, which is simultaneously nostalgic, observant, and funny (much of the humor comes from how “Agard” sounds like “haggard”).
The grace with which Williams describes these public moments of American history is matched by how he describes a very private part of American history: interracial love. The wife and lover of Harry Ames is white, and many (though not all) of the women Reddick sleeps with are white as well. The racial divide can both bring Black men and white women together, and pull them away from one another; their relationships are both a forbidden pleasure and a reminder of how stubborn the persistence of the color line can be. Williams is very skilled in describing these couplings and the subtle social fractures that shape them. Subtle, that is, to readers today – the ways in which interracial relationships were restricted are frequently unstated, only alluded to, because they were so obvious at the time as to not need explanation.
One of the most shocking things about The Man Who Cried I Am is how it anticipates the tumults that would erupt across America in 1968, the year after it was published, even going so far as to predict the assassinations of MLK Jr. and Malcom X. Indeed, Williams was so prescient, so well-tuned to the direction America was heading in that I checked the copyright page several times, thinking this must have been a novel published in the 70s at the earliest. But no, it came out in 1967. 2
One more comment: the character of Harry Ames does not strike me as believably like Richard Wright. Wright was a perpetually unsettled man, whereas Ames exudes confidence, even cockiness in the face of racism. Ultimately, Ames is more of a specter than a full character, reflecting Reddick’s insecurities and aspirations. The specter of Wright’s fiction too haunts The Man Who Cried I Am – at several points, the novel takes a very dramatic turn to the Wrightian grotesque (at one point there is even a cannibal). I take these moments as an expansion and reworking of Wright’s model (just as Wright was expanding and reworking the model of Dostoevsky). The intimations of an apocalypse for African-American society (and the rest of the world with it) that appear at the end of the novel did not, in reality, come to pass; what was left in the wake of this anticlimax was an opportunity for more writers to build upon this model.
Once again, apologies on the long delay for my latest review. I was working on a novel of my own, an endeavor which sapped my critical energy. I hope to have much more very shortly.
I was fortunate to read The Man Who Cried I Am at the same time I was reading Adam Shatz’s essay collection Writers and Missionaries, which contains a section (“Equal in Paris”) with several insightful critical essays on midcentury Black American writers (Wright, Baldwin, and Gardner Smith) who all spent time in France. It was this part of Shatz’s book that lead me to speculate on the similarities between Gardner Smith and Reddick. I would highly recommend Shatz’s book to any reader of The Man Who Cried I Am (and vice-versa).
Interestingly, while in many respects it could not be more different from Portnoy’s Complaint, they both are quite clearly works of mainline American fiction written in the mania of the late 60s. Some of this comes from the fact both were written at the peak of the sexual revolution but without any real influence of feminism; both are, in their ways, psychosexually intelligent while also sometimes treating women, in Reed’s turn of phrase, “as though they were livestock inspected for sale on the market.”
Excited for your novel!!