All the essays [in Soul on Ice] deal with racial hurt, racial struggle, and racial pride. Mr. Cleaver is a black man, and he is not going to let either himself or anyone else forget that fact—in case it is possible for an American of either race to do so. Ralph Ellison and even James Baldwin want above all to be writers, and Cleaver says no, that is impossible, that is foolish, and certainly that is wrong.

I am with Ellison and Baldwin all the way, but the author of a book with the stark, unrelenting title Soul on Ice would expect that of me, a reasonably unharassed white middle-class professional man who, really, in many ways had it made from birth. I don't at all like the nasty, spiteful way Mr. Cleaver writes off Invisible Man or Another Country. I don't like the arrogant and cruel way he talks about Baldwin's life and his personality. I don't like the way he lumps white men, all of them, indiscriminately together, and I'm sick and tired of a rhetoric that takes three hundred years of complicated, tortured American history and throws it in the face of every single white man alive today. Mr. Cleaver rightly wants to be seen for the particular man he is, and I don't see why he should by the same token confuse the twentieth-century traveling salesman with the seventeenth-century slave trader. If he wants us to understand American history, and in fact see its economic and political continuities, all well and good; but it is really stupid to tell today's white people that they caused what in fact gradually and terribly happened. What can anyone do with that kind of historical burden, "do" with it in the sense of coming to any personal or psychological resolution?

I suppose one thing that can be done is what Maxwell Geismar does in his short and thoroughly unsurprising introduction [see excerpt above]. Mr. Geismar has abandoned himself without qualification to Mr. Cleaver's scorn and outrage. The black man cries out, and the white man says yes, yes, no matter what. Eldridge Cleaver is a promising and powerful writer, an intelligent and turbulent and passionate and eloquent man. But Geismar ironically treats him with the ultimate condescension of exaggerated praise, and even worse the cruelty that goes with using a man as an irrelevant foil. (pp. 106-07)

[If] I were Eldridge Cleaver I'd watch out. Praise is like power; there is nothing as corrupting (and yes, insulting) as absolute praise, particularly when one's very humanity is denied. (Which writer is without a "trace" of "self-vanity"?)

Nevertheless, apart from the introduction to this book, and apart from its black nationalism, there are some really lovely and tender and even exquisite moments to be found—when the author becomes a writer, not a pamphleteer and not a propagandist and not a devious, cruel literary critic, but a man who wants to struggle with words and ideas and tame them. There are ostensibly four parts to the relatively slim volume, but actually it is split in two. "Letters from Prison" and "Prelude to Love—Three Letters" show how one inmate of a jail becomes something much more, a literate, sensitive, and intelligent human being. There are white millionaires who have failed where Cleaver has succeeded.

How did he succeed? Why? We ought to ask such questions, even as we do with Malcolm X, Cleaver's great hero. People like me can tear Cleaver and Malcolm to shreds. We can discover the bad "background" they come from. We can find pathology everywhere—mental illness, physical disorder, social chaos, cultural disintegration….

Yet at times he writes vivid, compelling prose. He has a sense of humor. He knows how to be astringent one minute, ironic the next. He can be tolerant and compassionate, far more so in my opinion than the man who wrote the introduction to this book. He is full of Christian care, Christian grief and disappointment, Christian resignation, Christian messianic toughness, and hope. He loves his lawyer, a white woman, and pours out his love to her in three beautiful, incredibly subtle and blunt and unsparing and unforgettable letters. How did he do it—learn to write, learn the really impressive theological subtleties that are addressed to his lawyer?…

Of course he also learned the other things, the handy political and sociological clichés that have blinded black and white men everywhere in every century. But above all we must notice what he has done: begun (and only begun) to master the writer's craft. For that achievement Eldridge Cleaver deserves our unashamed awe, our admiration, and our insistence that like every other writer he work harder, rid himself of unnecessary baggage, and put to word the startling ironies that he knows from real life but sees and comprehends out of his mind's life. He ought to spare us nothing, but he ought to spare himself very little either. Inside a developing writer there is, there has to be, a kind of ice that somehow uses but also transcends the weather, the scene, the hot and cold of the outside world. (p. 107)