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Overview
When his military service ends at the close of World War II—a period that will continue to haunt him throughout his life—Cato Douglass resolves to pursue a writing career and follows his dream to New York City.
Soon, his first novel is published, and it appears his dream has been fulfilled, enabling him to travel the world, fall in love, marry, and start a family. But despite possessing a talent that shines brighter than that of many of his literary contemporaries, Cato discovers that he is trapped within a racist system. Only a handful of black writers receive the support of white editors and critics, and because Cato’s work pushes the boundaries set by the publishing industry, he is doomed to a life of obscurity.
The Chicago Sun-Times proclaimed !Click Song “a major novel by one of America’s finest living writers.” Winner of the 1983 American Book Award, John A. Williams’s enthralling chronicle of a writer’s lifelong struggle to matter is a blistering tale of art, industry, family, and race.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504033046 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 02/02/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 430 |
| Sales rank: | 1,049,800 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
!Click Song
A Novel
By John A. Williams
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1987 John A. WilliamsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3304-6
CHAPTER 1
His blue eyes twinkled slightly, and he extended his hand. "Paul Cummings."
"Cato Douglass." (Cato Caldwell Douglass. At home and in the marines they called me C.C.)
He was tall, tending toward gaunt, in his rumpled Eisenhower jacket, and his face was sharp with angles. He studied me; for a fraction of a second he seemed anxious and the next vaguely arrogant. I had met people like him before, the other, white marines, who chatted with you (seemingly secure in the knowledge that, even though you were a marine too, you were not quite like them) when their northbound ships stopped at our atoll, and then went away, leaving us to man our antiaircraft guns against Zeros that no longer came that far south. We had had our combat and had been written up in the magazines back home; we'd disgrace no one.
He rocked slightly and ran his hand through light brown hair that was longer than most men were wearing it.
He did not remember me, but I'd seen him in my Survey of Western Literature class. The hall teemed with people. Students answered the roll for friends who were cutting, and the instructor peering out over the mob, composed mainly of veterans, accepted any voice as proof of presence. I couldn't cut; I was the only black person in the class.
We talked of the branches we'd served in, our wives, the university — tentative touchings to see which kind of a relationship, if any, would work.
"This Professor Bark's supposed to be a pretty good writer."
"Oh, yeah?" I said. "Poetry?"
"Short stories. Mostly for A.M."
"Ummm," I said. I didn't know what A.M. was.
He sensed that and said, "Atlantic Monthly," without making me feel like a fool. "Are you a poet?"
"I write some but —"
"I do a lot of it myself," he said, treading confidently over my words. "But I think I'm ready for fiction."
A coed with honey-colored hair, and skin the complexion of unfrothed cream, walked briskly by, her buns rolling and swelling in fetching movements.
Paul's eyes followed her with a nonchalant lust. "We dreamed of women like that, right? I never saw anything like that in two years in Europe."
I wondered what his wife looked like and I wondered about him. I'd never known a white man who even implicitly was willing to share with a black man both women and career.
After that first class — in which Bark spattered the awkward silence with the question "Why do you want to be writers?" an asking that made us turn to the windows and look past each other until he, eyes filmed over with amusement, his tone barely hopeful, then asked, "Would Some One Care To Read?" while Paul, to my surprise, looked straight past him in those large, almost unbearable silences, and then, as if pushing upward against wet snow (pushing, I now know, against the historicity of the situation), I raised my hand and read — Paul and I began our afterclass beer routine.
I read the long poem about Gittens of our regiment, who, under those lean, breeze-blown palm trees and glaring white sand beaches lapped by blue-green tongues of the sea, went madder in that incongruous paradise, under which three thousand Japanese bodies were buried, earlier and more quietly than the rest of us. Not wanting him to be sectioned-eight in a fleet hospital back on Guadalcanal, we did not turn him in. He was not violent. About once a week he said plaintively, "I'm going home," and loped to the beach and dove into the sea to begin his ten-thousand-mile swim to Philadelphia. We would coax him out. Once he did not say anything, so we did not see him go, and never saw him again.
"Good story in that poem," Paul said. A sneer, I thought, lurked on the edges of his smile. "Probably a better story than a poem."
But I was still bathed by Bark's glance (Heyyyy, who's this nigger?) and nod, still elated that after I'd read, broken the ice, the class had come clamoring after, hands raised like the spears of a medieval mob.
Paul did not volunteer to read, though he had material.
My wife, Catherine, did not really share my elation. Her smiles were filled with pride, and she embraced me as if performing a ritual. Great, I thought. Paul's jealous and Cat yet doesn't know what it's all about.
When she met Paul and Janice (who looked like the coed who had passed us in the hall the day of Bark's first class) she expressed reservations about them. And that is what she called them, Them, or Those People. She seemed to think that they were leading me somewhere or interfering with our life.
It was very late in the semester when Paul read, and I was impressed by his vocabulary and by the very force so filled with assurance with which he read. He had talked a lot about this story. But I was made uncomfortable by it. It was a tale of a tough soldier and a tender whore. Hemingway lurked behind every adjectiveless sentence. I winced when the class, one by one, implacable as a giant amoeba, began to devour him whole. Paul had held forth throughout the semester, offering extensive and exuberant criticism of everyone's work (some of it quite good), buttressed by the statements or works of a multitude of writers whose names hovered always at the ready on his lips. Now he was forced to defend every image, metaphor, period and comma — even concept — like a trapped dog. When the class was at last finished with him, and Paul, slumped low in his chair, rapping his teeth with a pencil, his ears a bright red, gave a loud sigh, Bark offered his comments, sewed Paul back up and wiped away the blood.
I had been promised by Paul's attitude that he was always, at all times, producing nothing short of literary dynamite. It had been, in fact, a small, damp firecracker. Over our beer several times I caught his eye just as it had finished some secret peremptory glance at me. What had I perceived about him, his work, was what the glance asked.
I had discovered something; re discovered something; and as we sat there, he rather subdued and I patient and, yes, patronizing, I thought back to my boyhood in my home town, specifically of mornings, springing from Tim Hannon's milk wagon into the daybreaking cool, a metal six-bottle carrier gripped in my hand, the smell of fresh milk, Tim's fat-man sweat and warming horseflesh in my nostrils, when I entered buildings with contempt that once I had held in awe because of their sturdy brick façades and cream-colored trim; they were in the white section of town. For years passing them along a proscribed trail I had a souring resentment of the residents. That had passed when I first went inside. The carpets were dirty and spotted and they stank; the walls needed plastering where they were not already stained beyond repainting back to a respectable color, and there was always a strangely lackluster commingling of cooking smells and the odors of fat old dogs and cats. Invariably I set the bottles upon swollen roaches and beads of ratshit, holding my breath until I got back outside, where, at least, the buildings looked good.
Even so, the year I met Paul the world cracked open for me, revealing endless possibilities to be achieved with words. Something began to click within me. I could write! I choked on words, drowned in them, constructed them into ideas; I wallowed in their shapes and sounds, their power to stroke or stun, sing or sorrow, accuse or acclaim. Living meant suddenly more than having a college education and being a husband and father. My life, then close to mounting twenty-two years, seemed presented to me once again. I exulted in the gift in quiet ways that I hoped would attract no one's attention.
I had not had much of a life until the war, to which I'd fled with dreams of screaming down on the dirty Japs or dirty Huns in my silver, bullet-spewing fighter plane, or leading a charge against them on the ground, knee-deep in their bodies. Fled from rat's-ass-end jobs that generations of my family, bitter resignation etched upon their faces, had settled in. The war got me away. It whetted my appetites; its horrors expanded my mind; and what men did to other men in it, underlining the whimsy of the species, brought me at last before Words as the keys to understanding.
We, Paul and I, shared a love of words and writing, and we understood, in that way people often have with each other, that he was the tutor and I the pupil. It was a role he enjoyed; he found it natural. We moved that year and the next, as seniors, from poetry to fiction and back to poetry, the Queen, once more, meeting her demands of precision and grace with the energy of the young, if not the skill of masters-to-be. We spent hours over beer gone stale talking of writing; missed dinners or were late for work talking of writing and writers; shouted writing above the din of small-time bop-playing student bands. But Paul hated bop anyway.
He preferred Dixieland and folk songs and the ballads that came out of the Spanish Civil War, and there were times when I visited Janice and Paul in New York and went to the Stuyvesant Casino to listen to Dixieland over pitchers of beer, and to be near the writers talking of J. D. Salinger and e. e. cummings. And how many nights back on campus did we end the evening with great, mournful choruses of Irene Good Night? A hundred, a thousand, and Catherine liked not one of them. She looked at those times the way a smooth, brown doe would look if does could show anger or disgust.
Looking at her then I would think, It's going.
And I would be afraid.
We had had a thing of long standing, through the gray last days of the Depression, through mutual embarrassments endured in homes where the lights had been turned off because our parents hadn't been able to pay the bill; we shared the youthful shame of being seen in clothes worn too often to school and to parties, of lunch periods in high school during which we ate no lunches because we didn't have them — while we pretended that we simply weren't hungry. After I fled to the marines when they finally allowed us in, she was my girl back home, her letters, tenderly scented, recalling spring proms, following me across the Pacific. She was waiting when I returned. We married and I took her away to school with me.
Won't you come along with me ...
Catherine was not enrolled. We had not the money for her to do so, even part time. But we had planned, yes, planned. We would do my assignments together; she would use my textbooks. What I learned, she would learn. She, too, would be studying Bacon and Johnson and Burton and Brown and Herrick, Cleveland, Lovelace, Marvell, Donne, Suckling and Crashaw; she would come to read Anglo-Saxon. Catherine would know an incline from a syncline, a fold, a fault, geological time from pre-Cambrian to Neolithic, the shapes of oceans millions of years ago. She would study the palatals, sibilants and glottals; she would get to know it all. She wouldn't have the diploma, but that was all bullshit anyway.
We went on one or two field trips and hoarded our money to see road company productions of Broadway hits, often with Paul and Janice. The months passed. I would return from my copyman job in an advertising agency (sometimes, for small things, they let me write copy) to find the books untouched, the assignments undone, and when. I started to talk about the lessons, a look of fright raced across her face, to be replaced by a grin, a grin with curling bottom lip. "Honey, I don't want to be bothered with that stuff."
To not want to know. There was, of course, nothing special about wanting to know that stuff, but all knowing is like climbing steps: one bit of knowledge lifts you to the next step, or should.
So I would look at Catherine and think, It's going.
She talked of the days when, finished with school, we would find ourselves respected citizens of a community where I taught literature. Teaching she understood. The writing was frightening her. First, she told me I was working too hard, staying up half the night writing those poems and stories which were, she said when she glanced at them too quickly to have read them, "nice." Then she called me crazy, after which, months later, she tangled the ribbon of the typewriter, that tough little L. C. Smith-Corona portable, so much that it took me a day and a half to straighten it. She stopped giving it up; I had to take it; and after a while I stopped taking it.
We lay in bed listening to each other's breathing, I waiting for her touch, she waiting for mine. Too much drinking at parties gave us our release; the mornings found us distant but polite as ever. It was still going. I didn't want it to go. I felt I owed it more than I'd given it, our marriage, and what of the kids we'd wanted to have? Who else did I know well enough, had known long enough, to want to have kids with?
On one of those nights when we lay in bed I said, "Catherine, I know it's not going okay with us. I don't really know why. I want it to be okay."
I felt her turning toward me. She sighed. "I guess it isn't going so hot."
"Then let's have a baby," I said. "We'll be able to manage through graduate school."
"Cate, do you really want to? Really?"
I thought I would hesitate, but I didn't. I said, "Yes, yes, I want to."
We giggled and embraced and fondled each other until I whispered, "We might as well begin right now."
She kissed me and got up and went to the bathroom. She slid back into the bed, murmuring, "All clear."
Paul and I finished college high as soldiers made ready for combat. We did not attend our graduation, and in the quiet summer hiatus, when Catherine went home to visit her father with the news that she was pregnant, I labored in the agency full time or worked at home, taking only a couple of weekends to visit Paul and Janice and to make the pilgrimage to Birdland.
In the fall, Catherine's belly swelling, I joined Paul in Bark's advanced writing course. Last year his look had been like a sad, slow sigh: Quo vadis, Africanus? The nigger in his look was gone. It would take me a long time to understand his new one.
Paul and I regularly submitted our work, mostly poems, to the "little" magazines. Once, to what I suspect was Paul's chagrin, Karl Shapiro of Poetry returned a poem with a note penciled in about the lines he liked.
Recklessly confident, I took to sending my poems to Elder Poets for their comments. William Carlos Williams had sent them back with an angry note — didn't I know that when I wrote to Elder Poets I should enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope? He did not say marvelous things about my poems. I told Paul.
"Say," he said, "what made you send your poems to WCW and not to someone like Langston Hughes?"
I said, "I went to see Hughes the last time I was in New York."
He sat upright in the booth where we were drinking beer. A distance seemed to grow in his eyes. "What'd he say?"
I told him what Mr. Hughes had told me about my work — exaggerating ever so slightly. (I didn't tell him what else Mr. Hughes said because I didn't want to believe it and I wouldn't forget it either: I would have to be ten times the writer a white man was and then it would be hell, which was not exactly an unusual experience. Agents would return manuscripts with rust marks from paper clips because they hadn't bothered to read the material. Agents and editors would tell you to forget race — but they rarely published anything by a Negro that wasn't about race. Still, they didn't want you to be too serious about anything, even if you were able. But if I just had to be a writer, all this and more wouldn't stop me, and that was good. And I certainly had to read Llewellyn Dodge Johnson's works if I hadn't already.)
Paul leaned back in a posture of muted arrogance, his eyes sparkling with a paternal kindness served up with a smile. "Hughes is good for what he does," he said. "I never liked his collection Fine Clothes to the Jew."
I didn't know it. I said, "What do you mean he's good for what he does?" I was rising to Hughes's defense.
"Well! He's not a William Carlos Williams, is he now?"
WCW was assigned; Hughes was not. And Mr. Hughes was not one of those writers who came every Thursday afternoon to read or to regale us with tales of writers and writing — Edel, Bowen, Auden, Ciardi.
And Paul's credentials got in my way. That liberal background in a liberal New York City neighborhood. That union father who fought through the labor wars and was now with Harry Bridges on the Coast. Paul's position in the Students for Democratic Action, which paralleled mine as president of the university chapter of the NAACP. But even with these things between me and my reality, I was beginning to sense machinations, like tiptoeing actors moving behind a set. I suppose that was why, in spite of our drinking days and nights, I had withheld confidences he on the other hand shared with me, perhaps, I sometimes thought, too openly, too eagerly. (I do not know why so many white men seem to do that, as if too heavily burdened.)
However, like entering boot camp or even changing schools, this writing, and its attendant fevers, was new to me and I must have carried my naïveté like a badge. That I had killed three men for sure (I think of them), and perhaps another two, during the war was not preparation for this or what lay ahead. Like most combat veterans, I felt that nothing in civilian life could ever match those encounters with that kind of death
(Continues...)
Excerpted from !Click Song by John A. Williams. Copyright © 1987 John A. Williams. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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