The madness takes its toll, but it should be clear, before all critical connection between the black and white sensibility breaks down, that, for the Negro writer, madness comes not in hating the white world but in hating it without style. A lucid rage can be an effective cultural weapon; literary delirium tremens can only bog down everyone's anger. This frenzy to set up an official literary barricade, to uncover symbols and tales which will promote some sort of atavistic tribal unity, can lead very quickly to a crippled art that threatens nothing. In the rush to do away with the racial double consciousness, it cannot be forgotten that art produces its own version of this division and that it has its own standards of manhood. What Eldridge Cleaver, for example, does to the white consciousness in Soul on Ice is shattering precisely because he appreciates and meets those standards, and so can pick apart with angry humor all the ripe details of that anger's object.

This collection of letters, essays, and dramatic monologues does what good books have always done: it presents a new stirring of experience that causes hidden sediment to rise where we can all clearly see it. Cleaver does not simply cry monster; he carefully strips away the lunatic raiment of both blacks and whites, sometimes affecting an ingenuous amazement at what he finds beneath, sometimes becoming a lyric moralist fired to rage over what he sees as dangerous threats to life. (p. 12)

From personal outrage, to revolutionary enthusiasm, and then into self-irony with a profession of love that scales things back to human size—Cleaver's style can cover a great deal of ground without stinting on its subject, for beyond having a rare honesty, it has a dramatic temper that makes it a point gently to remind us of who is speaking and from where.

If there is a major theme in Soul on Ice, it is Cleaver's use of the old Mind-Body difficulty, which he changes from an epistemological problem into a social and psychological one. When he looks at American society he sees it primarily as a function of this dualism, split into such categories as "The Omnipotent Administrator" and "The Supermasculine Menial." The Administrator has permitted The Menial certain rights: in physical areas—with, of course, the exception of sex—he may excel, but any aspiration to administrative prerogatives—e.g. the attributes of mind—is taboo. Thus Cassius Clay went too far when he became Muhammad Ali, for this was evidence that some intellectual process had taken place, and, what was worse, The Menial, The Body, did not hesitate to articulate just what that process was.

With a rueful anger, Cleaver uses this image in an intuitive rather than a sociological way to discuss some of the more interesting events of recent years. The transition from the Eisenhower to the Kennedy era, for example, he considers the beginning in the long-needed merger of the mind and body polarities, and he is devastating when he describes the white psyche thawing out as it tried to put on a little flesh by taking up the new—for the blacks, old—rock sound and the dances that went with it. Anyone who remembers Society's invasion of The Peppermint Lounge in the early Sixties knows the appositeness of Cleaver's description:

They were swinging and gyrating and shaking their dead little asses like petrified zombies trying to regain the warmth of life, rekindle the dead limbs, the cold ass, the stone heart, the stiff, mechanical disused joints with the spark of life.

That Cleaver sees this as a small, comical hope for the country does not mean his judgment of the white world is any the less exacting than that of LeRoi Jones; it is simply delivered in a human voice that convinces because of the heavy dues it must have paid in experience in order to write so well…. He does not have to set down "Blackness" as a subject, because every twist of intelligence, every turn of phrase make this identity a self-sufficient fact that needs no invective nor analogy to jazz to come into sharp relief; and as old categories of thought break apart, minds like Cleaver's are sorely needed, minds that can fashion a literature which does not flaunt its culture but creates it. (pp. 12-13)