Hard truths

Visitors
to the Rare Books Library at the University of Rochester this summer may feel
like they have entered a parallel world. Filling 19 large display cases are
books, articles, manuscripts, journals, letters, and photographs by, or related
to, the man writer Ishmael Reed has called the greatest American novelist of
the 20th century. So why is it so many people have never heard of John A.
Williams?

            “Right now he’s under the radar,”
says Richard Peek, the director of the Rare Books and Special Collections
Library at the UR’s Rush Rhees Library. “But he will be rediscovered.”

            Peek isn’t waiting for the world to
wake up to Williams. The UR’s Rare Book Library is the repository for Williams’
papers; Peek decided to give them the prominence they deserve. It’s an astute
decision. Williams is a singular figure in American literature, one well worth
getting to know through his complex novels and riveting non-fiction.

            In his introduction to the show’s
catalog, Reed explains why Williams is not as well-known as he should be.
“Nobody can accuse John A. Williams of shying away from the truth, and
sometimes the truth hurts.”

            Over his five-decade career,
Williams has often been too radical for the literary establishment and too
uncompromising for popular taste. In the early 1960s he traveled across America
in a new white car, recounting the hostility he encountered in a book, This Is My Country Too. (Williams jokes
that the book, written in the tradition of John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charlie, could have been
called Travels With Mr. Charlie.)
Barely two years after the death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. he published The King God Didn’t Save, a critical
look at the life and work of King that won him no shortage of disdain from
King’s many admirers.

            Williams’ fiction initially drew
praise from the literary world. In 1962 a panel of jurors consisting of John
Hersey, S.J. Perelman, John Cheever, and others unanimously awarded him the
American Academy of Arts and Letters’ prestigious Prix de Rome, a traveling and
writing fellowship. But, after an interview with the Director of the American
Academy in Rome, the fellowship was revoked. Something about Williams was
threatening to the system.

            Over the decades, Williams’
achievements have occasionally been recognized. He has won a National Endowment
for the Arts grant (1977), the American Book Award (1983), and the Phyllis
Wheatley Award for Outstanding Contribution to African-American Culture (2002).

            But none of this means he can get
his latest novel published. While the bookstore shelves and best-seller lists
are filled with ghost-written celebrity biographies and fiction hardly worth the
pulp it’s printed on, Williams’ 1999 novel, Clifford’s
Blues (an excellent book about a black, gay musician imprisoned in the
Dachau concentration camp during World War II) was published only in paperback
by an obscure press. His latest work has not found a publisher.

            But 13 of his novels, eight
non-fiction books, and two books of poetry have been published and are
available in libraries across the country.

            We spoke to Williams recently by
phone. The following is an edited version of our conversation.

City: While a teenager in Syracuse you were working on sanitation
department trucks. Later you held many other non-writing jobs. Did you know
then that, even though this may have been the expectation of white society, it
was not your fate?

            Williams: I wasn’t all
that concerned about what society expected of me. I knew that my mother worked
for a number of white families as a maid and my father worked for the city as a
trash collector and a number of other things.

            City: When you enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, you were fighting for your
country, which wasn’t exactly looking out for you. Were you still holding on to
some idea of the American Dream?

            Williams: I don’t think
I ever had any concept of the American Dream. When I was growing up, what I
hoped to achieve was to become a super athlete. I loved playing football,
basketball, and baseball, and running track. I hoped to be good enough at those
things to get a scholarship somewhere for college. The war gave me that
opportunity, making it possible for me to go to college on the GI Bill.

            City: You had a close call in the military and it wasn’t the
enemy, but your fellow sailors who threatened you.

            Williams: They were
really pure crackers, there’s no other term for it. And I just didn’t fit into
the mold. This was an outfit in transition; it was picking up more men. And we
— maybe there were five or six black guys — were also waiting for shipment
ostensibly to a black outfit, which is exactly what happened. But, in the
meantime, you had a lot of people transferring in and out and an awful lot of
them were southerners. I never knew there were so damn many southerners in
America. These guys did not know what to do with some of us who did not come
from the South. We just were not taking that shit. One night we got into it and
one cracker put a .45 to my head and the other crackers really got scared
because they knew that something bad would happen to them even if something
worse happened to me. So they backed off. But that was one time that I almost
got killed by our own troops.

            City: After a tough start, you began publishing. And your novel “Night Song” was
noticed enough to make you the unanimous choice of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters for the Prix de Rome in 1962. But after an interview with the
director of the American Academy in Rome, the prize was revoked. What do you
believe happened?

            Williams: The director
didn’t want me there. They’d had Ralph Ellison there and Ralph was always a
compliant guy. I’m not taking anything from his writing skills, although I
would have thought that he would have produced in his life a hell of a lot more
than he did. I’m not saying this because he’s dead; I said this when he was
alive.

            City: You’re right.“Invisible
Man” was great but where are the others?

            Williams: I think he
did one more, Shadow and Act. And
Ralph was the kind of guy who would not help younger black writers. He was
very, very selfish; very, very pompous. I never got close to him and I never
wanted to.

            City: But, in terms of the Prix de Rome, there was some speculation that you may have
been turned down because you were going with a white woman at the time and this
was in the early 1960s.

            Williams: Yes, I was.
And I married her, too. And it’s worked out really well.

            City: Later on, while in Rome, you wrote the director a note saying, “How does it
feel to have almost finished my career?”

            Williams: Yes, I did.
[laughs] But I never heard from him.

            City: This real episode in your life became a central plot element in one of your
most acclaimed novels, “The Man Who Cried I Am.” In the book you blend fact and
fiction in terms of your personal life and the life of the protagonist, and
also in your use of fictionalized historical figures. Is that a delicate thing
to balance?

            Williams: No, not at
all. Because I’ve always loved history and I can’t see writing a book that
doesn’t contain some level of the parameters of history.

            City: In the same book you wrote of the “King Alfred” plot, a plan to round up
minority populations at a time of National Emergency. Ishmael Reed has written
that, while this may have seemed far-fetched in 1967, government documents have
since shown that it wasn’t too far from the truth. Were you on to something?

            Williams: I don’t know
what got me started. I guess I have not been a very trusting person concerning
our government and the way it’s dealt with various people, beginning with the
Indians. My father was part Indian. It’s just been a mess.

            City: Ishmael Reed also says that you are the greatest author of the 20th century,
but because of your radical point of view you were unpalatable to the literary
establishment.

            Williams: I think
that’s been true. Even other writers who I’ve admired and who have appeared to
like my work have just sort of gone off on different tracks. When it all began
in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we were after something, even if we didn’t
know precisely what it was. We wanted to correct something bad that we sensed,
knew, or had experienced. I don’t find that anymore.

            City: There is also the idea that the literary establishment only has room for one
black writer at a time, whether it’s Richard Wright, James Baldwin, or Ellison.

            Williams: I don’t think
they would deny that too much.

City: I just finished “Clifford’s Blues” and it’s a wonderful
book. But I noticed it’s published by an obscure, small press. Is that the way
things are going?

            Williams: That has been
the case. Nobody wanted to touch that book and one of the senses that I got was
that black people are not supposed to have been involved in the Holocaust. This
is pure crap. You know, I made two trips to Dachau to do that book and I did an
awful lot of research around the country and in Germany and Europe, too. So I
knew whereof I wrote. People didn’t believe me, but I’ve seen the pictures
there in the camp. I’ve seen an entire column of black prisoners walking down
one side of the camp. And I’ve seen pictures of single black inmates or small
groups of black inmates.

            City: In the last two decades more attention has been paid to female black writers
like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Have you observed that?

            Williams: I’ve observed
it and so has [Ishmael] Reed, and we’ve laughed about it and joked about it.

            City: Do you think people find it less threatening?

            Williams: Yes.

            City: There was another irony with “The Man Who Cried I Am.” It came out in the same
year, 1967, as William Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” While this
book on the black experience by a white author cleaned up in terms of awards,
your book got comparatively little attention. You wrote an essay questioning
Styron’s assertion that this was the only slave rebellion. He clearly was not
aware that there were many.

            Williams: Yes, that was
idiotic. How can a writer make a statement like that without checking?

            City: When you were sent across the country in 1964 to write the articles that
resulted in “This is My Country Too,” did you take it on as a personal
challenge against the whole system? There are parts of the book when you are
traveling in the South and you have some pretty close calls, but you remain
defiant.

            Williams: I was a grown
man with kids and I was not about to take any crap, certainly not any more than
when I was a kid and overseas in the service. I wasn’t always so bold,
sometimes I was just very clever. If I picked up a cop following me, I would
very soon pull over and rush out of the car and open the trunk and get some
tools like I was having car trouble. Sometimes they would speed up and go by.
Sometimes they would stop and just make sure I was doing what I was supposed to
be doing and leave me alone. Sometimes I would simply tell the cop I was having
car trouble and could he direct me to a station and I could see the chagrin on
their faces. I’d drive into a garage, hang around for 10 minutes and get out,
make it to the quickest highway I could and then leave town.

            City: How much do you think things have changed in 40 years? There were incidents in
the Senate in the last few years that reminded me of your book. I think it was
Fritz Hollings who slipped and used the term “Nigra.” And, of course, the Trent
Lott affair.

            Williams: I think for
some people things will never change. My editor at Holiday, a guy whom I loved, Harry Sions — he was a correspondent
in the Italian Campaign during World War II. Twice, in the time I knew Harry,
he slipped and he said “nigger.”

            City: What do you think when you hear rappers use the word?

            Williams: I’d like to
slap them in the mouth. I really would.

            Next week: Williams discusses Martin Luther
King, Malcolm X, Affirmative Action, his writing style, the state of literature
and publishing, and the relationship between blacks and Jews.

Writings
of Consequence: The Art of John A. Williams continues
through September 30 in the Rare Books & Special Collections Library at the
University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library, River Campus. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5
p.m. Monday through Friday. Info: Richard Peek, 275-9335.

John
A. Williams, non-fiction

For
a great many Europeans, the black man is still the exotic stranger. Some
Negroes who have lived in Europe for decades, starting as entertainers in the
1920s, have passed through this period of greatest “pre-Negro” exoticism and
now live quietly in large homes they bought with money they made; they are no
longer victims of racism in reverse. But how often have even the most
intelligent Europeans interjected remarks about Louis Armstrong into our
conversations! The man is an institution abroad and I think it’s because he
fits the image of what a black man should act and look like. Jazz impresarios
have been known to cater to this image under the guise of bringing the best
jazz to Europe. They will bring the worst musicians to their countries because
they are black, and because they know that no local group, no matter how good,
can fill auditoriums as black musicians do.

            Black Man in Europe, Flashbacks: A Twenty
Year Diary of Article Writing, Doubleday, 1967

King
feared the phrase “black power” the way people fear a truth they are not ready
to hear. A power that was all black eliminated whites and, quite probably,
their contributions; an all-black power negated King’s concept of an
all-Christian life that went beyond the color of one’s skin. But the rapidity
with which the phrase gained acceptance in the black communities, and the
venality with which it was described in the white communities indicated that
its meaning and validity were clearly understood by all.

            The King God Didn’t Save: Reflections on the
Life and Death of Martin Luther King, Coward-McCann, 1970

John
A. Williams, fiction

The
cab rolled easily over the cobblestones; it passed the couples lingering over
the edges of the canals. Max suddenly felt frightened. There would be a billion
other nights in Amsterdam as soft as this one, filled with the odor of sea and
old bricks and tarred wood pilings; and there would be the smell of food,
drifting gently down upon the street from those Vermeer kitchens; there would
be young men and young women, unjaded as yet, talking about loving one another.

            I don’t want to miss it! Max
thought, I don’t want to miss any of it! I want to live forever and ever and
ever and ever…

            The Man Who Cried I Am, Little, Brown
& Company, 1967

Danko
swiveled his head from me to the Oberleutnant and back; he scowled at the others, What’s going on? I know he didn’t get any
answers. Franz was whisking those brushes around so soft that I knew he didn’t
want to miss any answer that might come. It was just me and Ulrich. In phrases
that ran just beside the melody (and I knew he was searching) he found the
reprise of “My Buddy.” “Buddy” my behind, I thought, and threw him “I’ll Never
Be the Same.” He got to his feet and planted them and damned if he didn’t cut
the rhythm right in half to play um humm-humm da da da-da da dummmmm, um
humm-humm da da da-da da dummmmm… “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen, Nobody
Knows My Sorrows.” I led him back to “The Man I Love” and gave everybody time
to get in, and we closed out.

            Clifford’s Blues, Coffee House Press,
1999

This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2003.