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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHAT BECOMES OF THE BROKENHEARTED  
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Gene Seymour
January 5, 2024
Bookforum
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_ Reviewer Seymour, in this reappraisal of this 1967 masterpiece of
American and African literature, calls this novel "a
what’s-it-to-you red cloak brandished in the collective face of
white supremacy." _

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The Man Who Cried I Am: A Novel
John A. Williams
Foreword by Ishmael Reed
Introduction by Merve Emre
Library of America
ISBN: 9781598537611

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL was for most of the previous century a golden
icon, an aspirational myth of grand and glittering proportions. Though
he never attained that grail, Seymour Krim, an ardent worshipper at
its altar, perhaps best articulated the dream in a 1968 essay in which
he described the hopes of fellow aspirants to “use the total freedom
of our imaginations to rearrange the shipwrecked facts of our American
experience into their ultimate spiritual payoff.” 

By the time that essay was written, “nonfiction novels” like those
of Truman Capote and Norman Mailer were changing the paradigm into
something at once less exalted and even more unreachable. (Krim
himself was more certain by then that journalism was Where It Was
At.) And if you, like me, were a young Black bookworm in the 1960s,
you began to wonder whether a Black novelist could connect as
immediately and directly to your people’s sensibilities as any Black
pop record that dropped on AM radio at the time. Did young African
Americans need to hear any broader affirmation of identity than James
Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)”? And as far
as more intimate inquiries into our psyches were concerned, could any
Black novelist’s work in that decade pack as much blunt assertion
and thorny romanticism in tight corners as Jimmy Ruffin’s haunting
Motown standard “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,” with its
protagonist making his solitary way through “a land of broken
dreams” and sifting through the “illusion” of happiness in
search of a “peace of mind” he doubts even exists. 

But there was at least one novel published by an African American
during that same era that delivered as much edgy melancholy as
Ruffin’s lament and the same hard-driving assertion of Black
identity as Mister Dynamite’s vinyl 45-RPM discharges. Even the
title of John A. Williams’s 1967 masterwork, _The Man Who Cried I
Am_, was a what’s-it-to-you red cloak brandished in the collective
face of white supremacy. The novel itself, recently republished by the
Library of America, is an idiosyncratic, rancorous compound of roman
à clef, sociocultural history, bildungsroman, and international
thriller complete with an apocalyptic ending that patched
disquietingly into our worst nightmares of what white America
ultimately had in mind for us. Imagine a chronicle with the sweep,
breadth, and momentum of Honoré de Balzac’s _Lost Illusions
_morphing plausibly into one of Eric Ambler’s darker and more
acerbic spy melodramas. Only with Black people—sad, mad, and
fiercely articulate—in the foreground. 

Williams (1925–2015) was an accomplished magazine journalist and
widely respected novelist who wrote twelve novels (notably, 1963’s
_Sissie_, 1976’s _The Junior Bachelor Society_, and 1982’s _!Click
Song_), nonfiction works (including 1970’s _The King God Didn’t
Save_, a controversially critical biography of Martin Luther King
Jr.), and a collection of poetry. Despite his copious output over four
decades, he was regarded in his _New York Times_ obituary as
“chronically underrated.” 

Max Reddick, the front-and-center character of _The Man Who Cried I
Am_, is likewise a celebrated journalist and novelist; he’s such a
celebrated author that by the time he’s beckoned to the White House
for a job interview by an unnamed president—young, charming, bearing
a “large, brutishly square head” (clearly a surrogate for
JFK)—the latter remarks that Max “looks bigger on the dust
jackets” of his books. Max accepts the president’s offer of a
speechwriting gig for which he will be consulted on racial issues,
only to leave not long afterward, mostly because his advice isn’t
taken seriously by others on staff. Max adds that dismal,
heartbreaking experience to one of several letdowns in his crowded
life. Even the African-bureau job for a _Time_-like news magazine
disappoints as he discovers signs of petty conflict among tribes and
the inconvenient fact that “most of the Africans he met did not like
black Americans; in fact, they held them in contempt.” 

But those are all flashbacks that come later in the novel, which opens
in the summer of 1964 with the most crushing disappointment of all:
Max is dying, painfully, of anal cancer. He is in Amsterdam, meeting
up with his Dutch ex-wife Margrit, whom he doesn’t inform of his
illness. All he tells her is that he is “tired.” To himself, he
thinks:

Bored, that’s what brought it on, bored with all of it, the
predictability of wars, the behavior of statesmen, cabdrivers, most
men, most women. Bored because writing books had become, finally,
unexciting; bored because The Magazine, too, and all the people
connected with it did their work and lived by formulae. He was bored
with New Deals and Square Deals and New Frontiers and Great Societies;
suspicious of the future, untrusting of the past. He was sure of one
thing: that he was; that he existed. The pain in his ass told him
so. 

He’s also in Europe because his friend and mentor Harry Ames has
died suddenly, in Paris, of an apparent heart attack and has left
something important behind for Max. Though they haven’t been in
close contact for years, Harry and Max were once all but inseparable.
A thinly veiled rendering of Richard Wright, Harry became Max’s
mentor and comrade when they met in 1939, after Max published his
first novel at age twenty-four. In the first of several detailed
flashbacks, Max is driving “over the same Long Island roads that F.
Scott Fitzgerald had made famous. . . . Hell, he was going to write
Fitzgerald out of existence.” Throughout the book, Williams displays
a Fitzgeraldian lyricism that can move from plaintive to rough-hewn as
Max makes his way through a chaotic mid-century America, moving from
the edge of Depression and global war to the emergence of Cold War
paranoia and the portent-laden pre-dawn of the civil rights
movement. 

Through the prism of Max’s memories, history becomes personal for
both Max and Harry, with the former confronting vicious bigotry in a
segregated Army during World War II and then becoming all but ravaged
by a tragic romance with a middle-class Black schoolteacher named
Lillian, who dies from a botched abortion. Harry, meanwhile, despite
his stature as a “father-figure” among Black novelists, was
awarded a prestigious literary fellowship in Athens, only to have it
taken away for what Harry assumes are political reasons. As with
Wright, Harry had been affiliated with the Communist Party, and left.
Also as with Wright, Harry leaves America behind for good not long
afterward, spending the rest of a not-altogether-happy life in
Paris—and under constant US government surveillance. Harry’s
rejection was inspired by Williams’s own real-life experience: he
was awarded the Prix de Rome fellowship in 1962 only to have it taken
away from him for reasons he suspected had to do with his attitudes
toward jazz, interracial love, and other matters he would directly
engage in this novel. 

With Harry and Max—complex, exceedingly sensitive, and often
difficult men—Williams depicts two seemingly opposite poles of Black
artistic advancement, with Max painstakingly climbing the professional
ladder from newspapers to magazines to subsidize his novels, and Harry
leading a more fiscally strenuous existence overseas. Their respective
struggles play out against a backdrop of social and political
intrigue, with fictionalized versions of figures such as Kennedy,
King, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X, here named Minister Q, whom Max
comes to admire for his militancy as much as he disdains the King
figure, Paul Durrell, who Max thinks is too indebted to the white
establishment to be trusted with Black people’s future. As Max’s
renown grows, so too does the resentment he feels from white and Black
people. Even when one of the latter, a Harlem acquaintance, proclaims
Max as “the black Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Honoré de
Balzac . . . Richard Harding Davis, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter
Winchell all rolled up into one,” it sounds to Max more like a taunt
than a salute. And when a chill develops between Max and Harry, it’s
likely that the bitterness is related to Max’s success. (“All the
things you thought I had, you should have had being Harry Ames,” Max
thinks.)

Which may explain why the very important thing Harry wanted to pass
along to Max after the former’s death is a stolen government file
detailing “King Alfred”: a US government “contingency” plan to
detain and eventually “vaporize” Black men, women, and children
“in the event of widespread and continuing and coordinated racial
disturbances.” After reading the file in the home of Harry’s
lover, Max places an overseas call to Minister Q in New York, knowing
full well the latter’s phone is tapped.

It’s hard to overstate the impact the King Alfred plot twist had on
readers, Black and white, in 1967. When first coming across this
hypothetical but eerily plausible program for genocide as a teenager,
I felt a cold draft similar to the one I had felt the previous
summer—while staying with relatives at a military base in upstate
New York—when I heard on a late-night radio account of the Detroit
riots that federal troops on the scene were actually “in retreat”
from the Black rioters. I don’t remember specific details, but I do
recall wondering what would ensue if this pushback took on a more
devastating effect—and whether my relatives or I would be at all
safe from undue government reaction in that remote, predominantly
white part of the world. Paraphrasing a riff by the late Black comic
Godfrey Cambridge, that’s the way it was in those days. 

Such was the shock of Williams’s ominous fantasy that for years
afterward it seemed all anybody wanted to talk about when they talked
about _The Man Who Cried I Am _was King Alfred. It summoned a blurb on
the novel’s first paperback edition from then–New York City mayor
John V. Lindsay, who declared, “If this book is to remain fiction,
it must be read.” With the FBI ramping up its COINTELPRO domestic
surveillance in the late ’60s and early ’70s on the Black Panther
Party and other activist groups, it was easy for readers of
Williams’s novel to believe the King Alfred plan wasn’t just
plausible but imminent. 

Williams’s own relationship with King Alfred seemed somewhat
ambivalent. As recently as 2004, in his afterword to a new edition of
the novel, he acknowledged the scenario’s ongoing relevance in the
emergent reality of post-9/11 crackdowns on civil liberties.
(“Homeland security sounds too very much like Fatherland
security.”) Any enterprising author knows a solid selling point when
he creates it. But in a 1971 interview with John O’Brien, collected
in his book _Interviews with Black Writers_, Williams lamented that
King Alfred had received disproportionate attention when compared with
the rest of the novel. “The acclaim has been political,” he told
O’Brien. “I wouldn’t mind so much if it was both political and
literary. But the literary acclaim has been missing.” 

To repeat: that’s the way it was in those days. Novels by Black
American writers were routinely combed for sociopolitical significance
and, once that was out of the way, reviewers seemed to lose any
allotted time for aesthetic considerations. It would have been
nice—hell, it would still be nice—to have critics reach beyond
racial apocalypse and talk about Williams’s ingenuous and trenchant
interweaving of characters based in history and characters trapped by
history. Does anybody notice how much the narrative form owes to
Malcolm Lowry’s similarly harrowing account of a doomed man haunted
by his past, _Under the Volcano_? Williams mentioned his debt to
Lowry, a fellow jazz aficionado, in that John O’Brien interview, and
there’s even an acknowledgment in the novel when Max and Margrit
take a trip to Mexico, where Lowry’s British protagonist meets his
fate: “Everybody in the town talked of a writer named Malcolm Lowry
and Max smiled and said, ‘I bet that cat didn’t know _half_ the
people who say they knew him. Poor bastard: he could have used some
knowing.’” And let’s talk of Williams’s wildly allusive,
ferociously musical style, which builds upon the elemental, corrosive
prose of hard-boiled writer Chester Himes the same way Raymond
Chandler played lyrical changes on Dashiell Hammett’s low, laconic
tone. (Williams was a close friend and confidant to Himes, whose
tough, rueful demeanor also provided some of Max’s personality
traits.) _ _

All these elements helped propel a compelling narrative voice that
comes across like a long, strong, sometimes strident jazz ballad,
alternating street-level humor with brokenhearted stoicism, especially
in Max’s interior monologues, one of which openly alludes to the
effect Williams wanted to achieve and, most of the time, did: 

He wanted to do to the novel what Charlie Parker was doing to
music—tearing it up and remaking it; basing it on nasty, nasty blues
and overlaying it with the deep overriding tragedy not of Dostoevsky,
but an American who knew of consequences to come: Herman Melville, a
super Confidence Man, a Benito Cereno saddened beyond death. He wanted
to blow the white boys off the stand—those who couldn’t blow like
niggers—before they took the whole thing and made an intellectual
exercise out of it. Goddammit, yes!

Yes, indeed! 

It’s also true I wish the women in the book were treated with
greater depth and empathy; most of them seem, as with many of their
counterparts in postwar American fiction, outlets for sexual conquest.
Still, while it doesn’t dispel my qualms here, Margrit Reddick,
compelled by racism to leave her marriage to Max behind, is given one
of the book’s best lines, one that’s stayed with me as long, if
not longer, than the specter of King Alfred: “Enough of this crazy
land . . . where everyone speaks in superlatives but exists in
diminutives.”

Rereading quotes like this makes me regret something else that King
Alfred, important and effectively terrifying as its conception was,
did to the rest of Williams’s novel. Its presence, much like racism
itself, negates the promise and vitality of everything that preceded
it. Even when the stone rolls back down on Max or Harry or Margrit,
even when they face the malign conspiracies and stunted imaginations
of those who “exist in diminutives,” there is abundant life and
promise and hope woven into their struggles.

I should be grateful to those who recognize the threat implicit in
King Alfred and dedicate themselves to making sure it “remains
fiction.” But  I would be a lot more grateful if _The Man Who Cried
I Am _could finally be seen and recognized for what it is: not _the_
Great American Novel, but a Great American Novel with all the robust,
surging, sometimes heedless energy we once associated with the
long-ago-but-ever-abiding dreams of Seymour Krim and bookworms
everywhere. 

Gene Seymour [[link removed]] is a
writer living in Philadelphia.

* novel
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* American literature
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* African American literature
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* the 1960s
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