The movement of Americans of African ancestry to fulfill the vision of a necessary, if unpromised, land boasts its ranks of orators, defenders spiritual and real, legal philosophers and paralegal militants, prophets, and martyrs. So much is to be expected. But is it not strange that this movement has produced no satirist, no one to do for black and white what [Jonathan] Swift did for Ireland and England?… Why is there nobody but the Smothers brothers to whip out the moral dilapidation at the base of what, with choice neutrality, we call "political behaviors and socioeconomic conditions"? (p. 102)

[One] suspects that more than social style now inhibits satire; that might as readily invite it. And so one wonders if the hard reckless laughter, the irreverent wit, the brooding condensed to explosiveness, the sense of outrage and conscience and love—all of which mark Eldridge Cleaver's voice in the urgent claim of so many Americans to live themselves America's vision of itself—really mark Cleaver as a satirist in potentia or a satirist manqué. The author of Soul on Ice has the satirist's mood but not his mission, some of his perceptions without his sense of design. The working design, meantime, may appear less than obvious. (pp. 102-03)

Not strictly satire or autobiography, Soul on Ice strikes one as a satura tentatively placed on an autobiographical stand, a mixed dish of letters, dramatic vignettes, politics, history or historiography, journal, character sketch, psychology, reportage, and sacred address. What sustains it, along the way, is its clear sense that formal circumstances differ from substantive conditions, a sense of freedom and candor that continually promises, and delivers, the "creative moment."

Something heroic, if also blithely romantic, appears in the following distinction between accident and reality: "I'm in prison … a Negro … [have] been a rapist, and … have a Higher Uneducation…. But what matters is that I have fallen in love with my lawyer [Beverly Axelrod]."… And some may relish the realism and wit of Cleaver's idea that venturing to attend a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) church would have caused him to be cut down and martyred: "St. Eldridge the Stupe."

The book also sustains itself by a kind of patterned unpredictability. One repeatedly finds that what at first seems a mere record of experience revolves into a recreation of the spirit and power of experience. Cleaver almost appears to be aware of this, and in control of it; at least, in one of the letters, he hesitates to make a statement because it may be "predictable and trite," but makes it of course, and it comes out all the more real and lively for his moment of reticence. In this vein sensible but not distinguished reflections on pre-1968 politics suddenly turn inspired with the anticipation that America might come out against Lyndon B. Johnson; the description of the "Jewish stud out of New York" livens and leavens a somewhat routine account of prison experience; a catechism on "Domestic Law and International Order" curves and soars into poetry and drama…. (pp. 103-04)

Another kind of planned unpredictability arises from Cleaver's unsettling definition of the audience. The "Letters from Prison" (neo- or pseudo-Pauline) are neither addressed nor open, and the reader is more vitally exposed than the writer to the difficulties of defining the literary relationship—the writer's life style is in the line, not on it. Of course the letter as an artistic genre tends to threaten the reader with embarrassment, since he may find himself willy-nilly playing intruder, or snoop, or even censor (as in the case of Cleaver's love letters, where the reader as outsider implicitly hinders the private writer's freedom of utterance). But Cleaver goes further, asking the reader who avoids such pitfalls to make of himself a tacit, and fit, correspondent. More explicitly challenging, Cleaver will bring off abrupt changes of address: now he is speaking about people, analytically, then of a sudden is speaking to us, accusingly. (p. 105)

For the individual sections, the essay on Baldwin stands out as a piece of writing and of scandal. Its principle of criticism, to search out the man in the work, is reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence; its form is beautifully modulated from hero-worship to misgiving to disaffection to pity and repudiation. The charge against Baldwin, that he hates Negroes and is substantially irrelevant, may or may not be sound (perhaps the question should be in what sense he has a funky soul), but it is ingeniously and eloquently made.

The letter "On Becoming" also strikes home, as a Mailerish, idiosyncratic version of a politico-historical event, the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation. Cleaver the instant outlaw of freedom might seem to bring to very life the argument from prudence against that decision and all like it; but do we blame the banker for being agitated when he learns that massive embezzlement has been going on in his bank? A corollary point, since Cleaver obviously had not known what he was missing, is that theft counts as a wrong when committed, though action against it must wait upon discovery.

Another piece, "The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs," is something of a tour de force of sex and psycho-social drama, too densely packed with experience and too fiercely direct not to be a little blinding and obscure. By contrast, the final address "To All Black Women, from All Black Men" has an aura of the holy, with its humble resolution and grave affection making it, in the original sense, an act of atonement and of adoration.

But it is unjust to ourselves as well as to Eldridge Cleaver to put down Soul on Ice as a de facto anthology. The tendency of his own mind is to seek a discriminating synthesis, which can see a turning away from rebellion in Malcolm X and a turning toward rebellion in white youth of America as hopeful signs of the same redeemed future, or see that prison, however brutal, can be a man's path beyond "the usual multiplicity of [artificial] social relations" and into "the total impact of another individual upon himself" in a "beautiful relationship."

From the outset, in the "Letters from Prison" and especially in the title piece, "Soul on Ice," Cleaver makes it clear that he is concerned with the varieties and vicissitudes of human relationship. And it is this concern which ultimately, and naturally, sustains and unifies the work. The rhythm of Soul on Ice carries from a negation of relationship in the opening piece, to a tentative contact in the next, and thereafter a tortuous course of forward flashes, sidelong sweeps, and backward swings, until the final piece, the culminating statement of relationship, "To All Black Women, from All Black Men." Within this rhythmic pattern Cleaver makes precise and very telling use of letters. For the letters, which announce the necessity and ideal of a beautiful relationship, at first speak at large, to no one in particular, but reappearing are addressed to one person, Beverly Axelrod, who answers and so makes personal and real what has been but general and tentative. Now Cleaver, having successfully spoken as one man to one woman, can and does undertake to speak for men in a class to women in a class.

It may be too much to say that a Platonic expansion and elevation of feeling is taking place. On the other hand, a real expansion and elevation of feeling, with Platonic overtones, does take place. For if Soul on Ice is what [Ernest] Hemingway might have called a true book, a book true to experience, the experience has paradox or plurality in it. Here is not only experience, but the soul of experience, and that soul, already ambiguously on ice, is also on fire and in one sense expanding. (pp. 105-07)