a very crazy place
by
Douglas Messerli
John
A. Williams Clifford’s Blues (Minneapolis:
Coffee House Press, 1999)
“I
keep wondering what the world will be like when this is all over, when the
inmates of this great insane asylum get free of the
keepers. And what about the
rescuers who’ve waded in blood to save us? The world will be, I think, a very
crazy place.”
Clifford
Pepperidge, in
Williams’ Clifford’s Blues
When I read in
the news that fiction writer John A. Williams had died in July, suffering from
Alzheimer’s Disease, I immediately felt that I needed to read a work by the
author, something which I’d previously never found the time to do. I thought
that perhaps I might read his well known bestseller, The Man Who Cried I Am, which might be interesting to discuss
within the context of the racial issues which I was considering in the 2015
volume of My Year. That book,
however, appeared to be out of print, and the copies that did exist had been
marked up to rare book prices. Most of his other titles also appeared to be
rare, with the only readily available title being his 1999 work, Clifford’s Blues. I had no idea what
this fiction was about, but quickly ordered it on from Amazon.
As one might imagine given the two-volume
break down of this My Year volume,
with its emphasis on identity and how those issues have been represented
throughout the 20th century and into our own times, a great many
books stood on my nightstand ahead of Williams’ fiction, numerous volumes of
which concerned the Weimar years in Germany, the rise of Nazism, and the
terrible consequences of World War II and after.
When I finally got round to reading Clifford’s Blues I was startled to
discover that it too was concerned—like Stephanie Baron’s New Objectivity art show, the study of sexuality in Berlin by
Robert Beachy, the four works I had written about Stein’s wartime experiences,
and Martin Sherman’s play, revived in Los Angeles in 2015, Bent, along with two recent volumes on Eichmann—with issues of homosexuality, artistic expression, and the
brutality of the wartime years, remarkably, moreover, from the point of view of
a black man. As I read the book over several weeks, I begin increasingly to
feel, as I have felt so often over the years about many of the writings,
events, and performances I have encountered over the years, that coincidence,
fate—whatever you want to call it—had led me to this work. I was destined to
read it, and perhaps could only come to comprehend its value and significance
in the year of Williams’ death.
Accordingly, I have the very personal
relationship with Clifford’s Blues that I feel toward many works, but
that is difficult to describe. It is almost as if this fiction was written to
be read by me at the this time in my life, and while I am sure that sounds
inordinately selfish, I cannot dismiss my feelings of being part of a
pre-ordained audience for this creative effort. It spoke deeply to me at the
very moment when I needed to read it.
That is not to say that Clifford
Pepperidge, the desperate hero of Williams’ fiction, is someone with whom I might
immediately identify. Growing up the rural south and tortured by his
experiences with white racism, escaping to the famed Storyville of New Orleans
before high-tailing it to New York where he briefly worked with seemingly
legendary black bands such as Sam Wooding’s, with whom he travels to Berlin
where, in the whirl of that Weimar city, Clifford and his fellow players
discover an open audience and appreciation they might never have encountered in
the US. That Clifford is a piano player and singer, puts him into the position
of a central figure, which, along with his sexuality, makes him a memorable
character within the context of his Berlin years; yet that very “recognition”
puts him in terrible danger when suddenly he discovers himself, apparently a man
of no great political perception, stranded in a country which has suddenly
turned racist and homophobic. If we might be terribly saddened about his
situation, we feel somewhat distanced by his self-pity, the tears and prayers
he proffers early in the book—in part because we know the future that millions
of others, in even more vulnerable and
terrifying situations, must face. Indeed, although Clifford cannot know
it, he is almost immediately put into a situation that makes him better off
than almost in anyone else in the terrible world that Dachau represents.
Dieter Lange—a queer (and in the context
of this fiction, this is the right word) pimp—recognizing the musician,
immediately pulls him out of the line for pink triangles, and gets him not only
a better designation, but a job working as his butler. Unbelievably, Lange,
having joined the Nazi party, has become head of the camp canteen and, in order
to free himself from any sexual insinuations, has married a stupid, plump farm
girl, Annaliese, who presumes that Lange’s sexual inattentions and proclivities
(he prefers anal sex) are absolutely normal. By drawing Clifford into his household, Lange finds
himself not only a desirable sexual partner when his Anna isn’t around, but a
man who can cook, manage his store (and later keep his books) and even
entertain for the couple. Moreover, as we soon discover, in Clifford, the
ambitious Lange has a wonderful entertainer for private parties which, at least
temporarily, provides him his further social connections with the likes of
Major Bernhardt and his wife Lily.
Anna, however, turns out to be not so
dumb, as she quickly discerns, through an incident in which she accidently
observes Clifford slapping her husband’s face, the relationship between their black
servant and her lover; and simultaneously she begins a secret affair with
Bernhardt. The politics, accordingly, shift, as Bernhardt, now in the know,
gains the upper hand, using Clifford and a few other musicians from the camp to
establish a small jazz band who, in stolen tuxedos, perform at his home until
the Nazi administration finally outlaws all black bands.
Because of the “specialness” of Clifford’s world and the fact that Williams
evidently felt that he need mention all the significant historical black
figures from Josephine Baker, Bricktop, Ma Rainey, Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith,
Louis Armstrong, Kid Orey, Fletcher Henderson, and Duke Ellington, to all the
major Nazi figures such as Eichmann, Goering, and Himmler, I was originally a
bit put off by the author’s beginning narrative, feeling that the list of texts
he references at the end of this novel were a kind of academic expression of
his fictional virtuosity.
But as the narrative slowly grows through
Clifford’s diary entries, we begin to encounter numerous fictional characters
that reveal the various aspects of this daily growing factory of death. The
vast accumulation of data, ultimately—the daily addition of information,
events, and tortures—not so very different from Stein’s fiction Mrs. Reynolds, ultimately begins to
build up a fiction that is absolutely remarkable in the sense that we get to
know the camp terrors and the increasing frenzy of the Nazis to arrest nearly
anyone, of any ethnic background (Poles,
Russians, Gypsies, etc), religious beliefs ( Jews, the Jehovah Witnesses, etc),
color (the Americans and African Blacks),
sexuality (mostly homosexuals), and German criminals that did not accord
with their idealized notion of Aryan superiority. At the same time, through
Cliffords’s experiences and writings, we perceive the not-so-gradual breakdown
of the German leaders’ lives and psyches.
Sexual affairs gradually transform into
orgiastic encounters (Clifford is forced into threesomes with Anna and her
friend Ursula, and later with her husband and her), the desire of quick profits
increasing grows into utter greed (as Lange grows more and more wealthy in his
accumulation of foodstuffs and materials, others take over his illegal
activities, using him merely as a front), and fear and boredom is transformed
into nightly drunkenness.
Bit by bit, both the reader through the
narrator see his friends die, masses murdered, and thousands of others tortured
through experimental medical tests. Through it all, Clifford himself gradually
loses his soul, having to force himself into a place in which he can no longer
feel. Having lost his gentle sexual companion, Memmo (a gay member of the
Jehovah Witnesses) and a totally innocent friend, young black boy, Pierre, who,
near death, finally commits suicide, the black musician tries to eliminate all
emotional responses, and nearly wastes away in the process. Used, again and
again, by others within Lange’s house and throughout the camp as a sexual
object, a route to escape (at one point he is kidnapped by two Germans who try
to escape to Switzerland with him), and, most importantly, but just as
troubling, as a witness, Clifford becomes a shell of a human being, who can
only observe the surrounding horrors with muted amazement.
The communists, socialists, and Russians,
particularly, some of the strongest of the Dachau prisoners, include him in
conversations wherein they reveal horrific actions and name the perpetrators,
hoping that, if he survives, he may able to testify to the horrors everyone
there has experienced. Their daily memorization of names and places cannot but
remind one of “living books” of Bradbury’s fiction and Truffaut’s film Fahrenheit 451.
Williams’ journalistic fiction is
particularly good in not only the slow accumulation of its details, but, again
like Stein’s Mrs. Reynolds, in the
presentation of events regarding the Americans, seen by everyone as the
potential saviors, but whose approach to those in complete desperation appears
almost to move in glacial speed:
They’re coming, but it’s
taking forever. The days
seem like weeks, the weeks
like years. We’ve even
gotten used to the bombers
going and coming. They
have little to do with us
except for the companies of
Himmelfahrtskommandos that march to the trucks to
dig bombs out of Munich’s
belly (while singing
“Lille Marlene,” which they
hope will get them some
bread and marmalade, maybe a cup of coffee
from a
civilian). We want the
planes to come, not by the
thousands, but by the
hundreds of thousands—but
every time they come, a
mess of prisoners goes into
Munich to die. Why the hell
can’t they bomb this
place, bomb all the camps,
destroy the factories and
rails everywhere, since the
prisoners are dying anyway?
Yet, if
Americans are the heroes to everyone in camp, Clifford knows a kind a truth
that no one really wants to hear: that things are far from perfect in his own
country, fearing that even if he is freed, his return home will not necessarily
mean a better world for him.
Finally, with Anna recovering from typhus
and Clifford, himself, infected by Lange with a case of syphilis, the two sent
out on foot toward the American line, hoping that they might reach safety and
escape the camp’s certain death sentence.
We never know whether or not they reach
safety or find a new life beyond the one to which they have been sentenced. And
the saddest thing of all, it seems to me, are the book-end letters to
Clifford’s entries between two figures from the 1980’s future, presumably a
jazz musician and a publisher, who have found a better life than in the US than
Clifford had even known.
On a trip to pick up his daughter, who has
just spent her junior year of college abroad, a figure named Gerald Sanderson
(nickname “Bounce”) describes how is has come into the possession of Clifford’s
journal, which he has copied and passed on to his publisher friend, Jayson
James.
Between jocular greetings, the two
discuss their admiration for what Clifford has written, without, somehow,
really being able to speak openly of his horrifying testimony. And in James’
comments, particularly, the author seems to acknowledge how this awful
communication might be received by any potential readers at the end of the
frightful 20th century:
I’ve now finished reading
the diary you sent—some
package! I will try my damndest
to get it into the right
editorial hands, but do
understand that we have a severe
generic problem in this
business….
The diary is a heavy thing,
Bounce. Bet you a sideline
ticket on the forty the next
Super Bowl that they’ll be
celebrating that war from
the invasion of Normandy
until its end—without
looking too hard behind or
between the lines. People
don’t know, and probably
don’t care, about the black
people in those camps,
not that there’s any honor
in having been in one. You
wouldn’t wish that on your
worst enemy.
Have we truly come to that, I pondered? Yes,
probably. I wonder how many copies of William’s Clifford Blues its small press publisher, Coffee House Press, sold:
500, 1000, 2000?
I can only tell you that after a year of
reading so many works of such perversity and despair, it is still nearly
impossible to comprehend the horrors that our fellow citizens, who lived
through the 20th century, perpetrated upon one another. And it is
comprehensible perhaps, if despicable, that we no longer want to hear about
them.
Why do I still feel, I often puzzle, as if
it is my responsibility, born after all, after that War’s end, to read, listen,
and explore these nightmare realities?
If I am nothing at all like Clifford
Pepperidge, I know I might have been, I could
have been. And I myself, accordingly, am tortured by his and all the others’
suffering.
Los Angeles,
November 11, 2015
