The great achievement of Cleaver’s book, distinguishing it from much of black literature, is a relative freedom from self-intoxication. In the end, rhetoric blurs thought.īut while he engages strong feelings, Cleaver in no way succumbs to them.

Soon one reads Cleaver not for argument or program, but for the affective experience. His short declarative sentences forge a frenetic mood, an orgiastic trance. He writes an inspired and wild prose that tends to subvert rational judgment. For a wing of the New Left Cleaver is the armed revolutionary who will level the capitalist structure.Ĭleaver himself must be held accountable for much of this misunderstanding. For the conservative he may be anathema, but he also represents more attractively black economy, decentralized schools, and local autonomy vis-à-vis the federal bureaucracy. Cleaver excites every possible emotion from love to hate. By emphasizing certain passages one can make him out a spokesman for fascism, Communism, or egalitarian democracy, a skilled psychoanalyst of black identity, a party propagandist, or a harsh critic of American civilization.

Though it is little more than a year since Soul on Ice was published, Eldridge Cleaver has been assimilated so rapidly by popularizers and professional reviewers that it is almost impossible to grasp the book in its original meaning. Soul Still on Ice? The Talent and Troubles of Eldridge Cleaver Stanley Pacion ▪ July – August 1969 Soul Still on Ice? The Talent and Troubles of Eldridge Cleaver

Cleaver soul on ice