The following essay is from Rediscoveries II, a 1988 “gathering of essays by novelists…asked to rediscover their favorite neglected work of fiction.” Ishmael Reed’s overview of John Williams’ 1982 novel !Click Song motivated me to track down a copy of the book. And while elements of Reed’s typically prickly essay are dated in their contemporaneous references, the essay’s thrust — that the Invisible Empire persists — is as timely as ever. Read more on Rediscoveries II at Neglected Books.
Ishmael Reed
on
John A. Williams’ !Click Song
The Ku Klux Klan may appear to be clownish, and inept to some, but they have one thing right. They do represent an “Invisible Empire,” of which, the kind of monkeyshines that go on in places like Forsyth County belong to those of a small ignorant outpost. On the day that some joker held a sign warning of welfare disaster if blacks moved into the county, a New York Times columnist and a book reviewer spread the same lie about welfare being an exclusively black problem, yet, I doubt whether demonstrators will march on the editorial offices of the Times.
Klan thinking goes on in the editorial rooms of our major newspapers, in the film, and television studios; and in the public schools, and universities whose white male supremacist curricula are driving Hispanic, and black children out of education. One hears Ku Kluxer remarks in places that present themselves as the carriers of “Western civilization” like National Public Radio where,recently, a man congratulated a musician for using the saxophone as a “serious” symphonic instrument. “Up to now,” he said,
“the saxophone has merely been used to make ‘jazzy howls.’ ” In “the Invisible Empire,” George Shearing will always receive more recognition than Bud Powell, Paul Cummings more recognition than Cato Douglass, and racist mediocrities will always get more publicity and praise than John A. Williams.
Like his character, Cato Douglass, who goes about correcting the Aryan lies of Ku Klux “museum curators,” John A. Williams is a covert operator in “the Invisible Empire” where the Klan don’t wear Red Sox baseball caps, and drink Dr. Pepper, but wear Brooks Brothers suits. When they “drink with another crowd,” it’s usually white wine and martinis that are served. His book, !Click Song, shows that the Ku Klux Klan has fifth columnists among whom are those you’d least expect, like Selena Washington, the black writer, and “Great Two-Fer,” whose obsession, borrowing from the ancient Klan program is that of regulating the sexual lives of black men and white women. The review of !Click Song that appeared in the black-male-baiting Village Voice could have been written by the Grand Dragon himself, but was signed by a black feminist, which only goes to show that the traditional enemies of black male writers like John A. Williams—who doesn’t hide behind pittypat prose—have been joined by womanists who, when they say that they are mediums, must mean that they are channeling for the confederate dead. They feel that in order to promote black feminist writers, they must “eclipse” black male writers, (“eclipse” being the word that one of their cowed white feminist supporters used when discussing the issue with me on the radio; she seemed to be gloating over the fact that titles by black male writers are out-of-print, but I’ll bet she did her dissertation on somebody like Pound.)
Their white male allies—Ruth Gorden rooters—claim that they are only trying to balance things, at though black male writers ever had any sort of prominence. As we are reminded in !Click Song there has never been room for more than tokens like John Greenleaf Whittington, and Elliot Huysmans, of this novel, and even becoming a token—usually a hit person—doesn’t guarantee that one will maintain a niche in the flaccid American literary Establishment. In !Click Song Williams alludes to the famous episode in which a well-known men’s magazine hired a black writer to cover the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire, only to replace him with a white writer. (Now both have been “eclipsed” as boxing writers by Joyce Carol Oates, in whose nonfiction and fiction black men are either boxers or rapists—she told T.V. Guide that her favorite “Hill Street Blues” episode was about a black rapist. Ms. Oates knows as much about boxing as the character played by Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen.)
The black writer Cato Douglass in !Click Song sums up his career philosophically: “I did not know that there was another more cancerous and far less glorious dying: it attacked in tandem,head and soul.” He begins his career naively believing that if a writer is good, he’ll be published, and attributes the rejection of his short stories to the tastes of individual editors: “Naturally, I told myself that the problem was one of individual editors, weak links in the solid chain, rotten apples in the barrel,” but by the end of the novel, after the “black wave” has subsided, the full corruption of the writing industry is revealed when his editor at Twentieth Century Forum, shows him the computer that determines whether writers live or die. Just as a recession for whites means a depression for blacks, when white writers have a difficult time, black male writers, and many females, too, suffer a calamity. !Click Song also reveals how black male writers are ripped off, abused by a racist academia, by other blacks, and by each other: “Then, as always we were cruel, even murderous to each other, like cocks set into a pit.” Of racism, Cato Douglass thinks: “The shape, the monstrous size and shape of this disease.”
I told The Harvard Crimson that the literary powers who are described in /Click Song would not recognize multicultural writers; I was corrected by a powerful critic whose thinking reflects that of the establishment. She said that the literary powers will recognize multicultural writers if they’re “good” enough, the kind of remark that got Al Campanis, the Los Angeles Dodger’s vice-president in charge of player personnel, fired. She is the author of an “American Anthology” of “Contemporary Poetry,”which doesn’t include a single Asian-American, Native-American,or Hispanic. Gwendolyn Brooks was not “good” enough for this anthology whose contributors are mostly white males. But Douglass, the writer who started off thinking that if he was good enough he would get over, says it all by page one hundred and seventy-nine of the hardcover:
To be sure, they admired Latin writers—but those in Latin, not North, America; they admired black writers, but many of those were from Africa and, in the case of Afro-Americans, dead; from the Caribbean they much adored, obversely, the minority rather than the majority writers, those who deplored, laughed at, or debased the island societies of which they were part; they exulted when good works on the Indian experience appeared, though not those written by the Amerindian himself, and they preferred Asian female writers to all like John Okada. And because they were a club, they frequently relegated to our ranks a few of their own.
To have survived in the writing industry, an industry more racist than blue-collar pursuits like baseball, and fast foods, John A.Williams deserved a medal, and in the 1950s they gave him one, a Prix de Rome, but took it back, for reasons that have never been fully explained. All one has to do is read Night Song, and !Click Song to see how Williams has gone from an apprenticeship to fiction master builder, an evolution that most professions would reward with prizes and honorary degrees. Instead, the literary establishment has attempted to Ku Klux Williams, because he dares to present subject matter they would prefer to remain occult. When they’re not on him, they send their pathetic gofers to scold him in print. Not only for his outspokenness, but for his “lifestyle”; we live in a country where even feminist writers like Janet Maslin believe that only Indiana Jones has the right to date, or marry, whom he pleases.
The artistry of !Click Song is abundant. As in “Shock burst inhis eyes like puffs of ack-ack,” and “reasons are as complex as fine woven Sardiana weave.” The book is full of lines that would stand up well next to the best poetry being written today. It is also a textbook of craft, one that I recommend to writing students throughout the country, not only for the dazzling display of Williams’ professional skills, especially in constructing, scene, dialogue, and narrative, but also because it’s a survival manual for those desiring to pursue a career in writing. Few novelists have his knowledge of history, not of the monocultural variety that’s taught to freshmen in American universities, creating generation after generation of bigots, but world history. Not even Pynchon has at his command the knowledge of the many disciplines that Williams brings to this book, and because of this, one has to conclude that The New York Times review of the book was written by a writer incapable of recognizing a master of the techniques of fiction when he sees one. With this book, Williams has challenged a far more dangerous Klan than the rock-throwing red-necked variety. It’s a lonely work which has few rewards. Chester Himes set a high standard of the tell-it-like-it-is, no frills, black male writers with his work, Lonely Crusade. Any black male writer worth his salt has to produce a Lonely Crusade. !Click Song is Williams’.
Biblioklept 