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BOOK REVIEW                      SIMON

A LITERARY MASTERPIECE

THE MAN WHO CRIED I AM. By John A. Williams. Little, Brown and Company, Boston. 402 pages. $6.95.

This is one of the great novels. When the white silence which engulfed its publication finally lifts, good men will be hard-pressed to compare it with any other modern novel. The Man Who Cried I Am is on the summit by itself. And somewhere, surpassed, on the shelves below, a reader might find Jack London's The Iron Heel, or better still, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, some novels of Hemingway with which to compare it. Comparisons will fail, since among its many virtues, The Man Who Cried I Am illumines the duplicity of white America in all its murky recesses-its self-righteousness, its sickening racism that's rooted and resistant even in the best of American whites.

Max Reddick, in the novel, a noted Afro-American writer, is the hero. We meet him awaiting his estranged wife at an Amsterdam cafe. Even though it's a pleasant mid-May day and the Dutch afternoon is alive, bright with girls cycling home from work, Max is depressed and bored. Life has lost its brilliance. Max drinks heavily. He is absorbed with the pills and the morphine he is taking to ease the furious pains of the cancer that is killing him. Under the influence of alcohol and drugs his luminous mind keeps slipping from one thing to the other. And we learn of Max's life. The whole thing is there, from the early forties to the beginning of the mid-sixties, World War II, segregation, peace, discrimination, Henry Wallace, loves, tragedies, breakthroughs, freedom rides, racism, the whose disgrace, "all deliberate speed," broken promises, angry blacks, the March on Washington, nationalism, black soldier cannon fodder in Vietnam, rebellious black artists-trailed by U.S. agents-living from one European capital to the other in search of freedom.

We learn of Max's best friend, the "father" of Afro-American writers, the expatriate, Harry Ames, who like Max refuses to be invisible. For this determination, he is cut down dead on a Paris street. Ames leaves Max the papers of a secret Western alliance, whose shocking contents, revealed in the novel, are no doubt the reason why this masterpiece has not yet been publicly heralded as an unparalleled work of art.

So skilled is the writing of John A. Williams, it becomes difficult

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