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Dancing in the Dark

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I'm a Bert Williams fanatic. I have all of the current cds of his 80 surviving recordings and DVDs of his surviving films "Fish" and "Natural Born Gambler", as well as having read all three of his other biographies. So I eagerly awaited this fictionalization of his life.

Caryl Philips did a lot of research on Bert Williams and his partner George Walker and it shows. A lot of this stuff is close to the fact. I especially loved the sololoquies that he has some of the major characters exhorting in the book, such as Bert's wife Lottie's expression of her love for Bert, George Walker's feelings on his partner's thoughts, and Betr's final meditation on his father. Phillips has a beautiful way with the King's English and wonderfully articulates the innermost feelings of his characters.

However, while I'm aware that this is somewhat fictionalized and some artistic license is inevitable, some things are too far off the mark. First of all, Bert and Lottie DID adopt the latter's three neices as their own children, contrary to the book (one of them spoke fondly of Bert in a 1946 interview in Negro Digest), and the scene where Aida Overton Walker (George Walker's Widow) makes an explicit, drunken pass to Bert and suggests that her husband was sleepign with Berty's wife is a bit off the mark. Yeah, it spices up the story, but considering that these were real people, it gives me some pause.

But that aside, I would suggest the reader familiarize themselves with Bert Williams via his nonfiction bios and his recordings as it would help in fully understanding this story. That said, be prepared for an interesting read.

"Dancing in the Dark" is a biographical novel of Bert Williams, the black entertainer who performed in vaudeville in the early part of the 20th century. He was one of the finest dancers and comedians of all times and eventually became the first black person to perform with the Ziegfield Follies. In his act, Williams played the slouching Jonah man, the careless, unlucky black for which everything goes wrong - a sort of "sad sack" character. To be acceptable to white audiences he has to play the shiftless, coon. Unfortunately, it was one of the only ways that white Americans would accpet a black on stage at the time. When Williams tried other roles, he failed. To perform his act, Williams had to blacken his face with burnt cork to cover his his light complexion and his racial pride.

Caryl Phillips uses a style of writing that allows several voices to speak: Williams, his wife Lotties, his long time partner George Walker and also Walker's wife, Ada who eventually becomes Aida. (And one wonders if the change of names is a play on the opera of the same name that is alleged to be an improper characterization of a black woman.) Although the style allows the reader to get the perspective of various characters, there were times that I was confused and had to take a second look to make sure that I knew who was speaking. While this style of writing may be pleasing to some readers, I felt it distracted from the story. Williams story is one that should be told, but Phillips makes it difficult to hear.

The subplot regarding George Walker, Williams long time partner, and the relationship between the two makes for interesting analysis. Walker is the more business oriented partner and demonstrates more apparent racial pride, but is also a womanizer, often risking his career and that of Williams with his frequent liasons, espcially with a white female. But all the while his loyal wife stays with him.

Lottie has conflicts over her hair and it is not until Madam C. J. Walker develops hair products for women that she is able to deal with it. Like her husband, who uses burnt cork to cover his face, she uses hats to cover her hair. Is Phillips trying to say that like her husband, Lotties is unable to accept her image as a black woman? Is she in conflict because she does not have "good hair" like her sister, a sister who comes to a tragic end.

Willliams conflict is over his desire to be an entertainer. But his only option is to appear in black face. He desperately wants to entertain and he is excellent at his trade, however, society forces him to perform a role that demeans the image of black Americans. Was it his obligation to give up his trade for the greater good of the image of African Americans? That is what he is faced with when black leaders confront him. It is interesting that Williams is a native of the Bahamas who does not experience realy racism untl he comes to America at age ll. One also wonders if Williams would have had a better life if he had folowed his dreams and stayed in Europe, where he has major successes, like many black expatriates have done over the years. Phillips uses the symbolism of ocean voyages, on which Phillips suffers, as an analogy of this crossing over.

One also wonders if Phillips is trying to say that all of the characters are subconsciously unable to accept their blackness but spend their life trying to accept the world as best they can. Is there an analogy here between Williams performing in black face and the resulting conficts and tradegies in his life and Michael Jackson who had changed his image to appear in white face?

Philllips innuendoes about Willaims sexaulity is also interesting. While Walker's sexaul promiscuity leads to his death from syphilis, Williams life of non sexual relaltions with his wife, leads to a tragic life for both of them. Or does Williams have syphillis also and does not want to infect his wife? The reader does not know. This is just one of the dark sides of this very dark novel. Is it his conflict over color or his conflicts over homosexuality that causes Williams to spend most of his off stage life in dark bars with a bottle?

While I enjoyed the book, I felt that there could have been additional character development, especialy about Williams' youth. Also his relationship with his father, a proud black man who only goes to see his son perform one time. He is so replused that he can never undertake it again.

The subject of Bert Williams is ripe for further investigation and analysis. While Phillips scratches the surface and raise interesting issues he merely perks the readers interest. It many ways he fails to get at the real character of Bert Williams. He portrayal of the dark side of Williams life is so dark, that perhaps we miss the real man.

In this fascinating novel, Caryl Phillips tells the tale of Bert Williams, a "colored" performer from the early days of the twentieth century who partnered with George Walker and became an international star. Wearing blackface and doing the cakewalk, Williams played the bumbling comic, an ironic and difficult role for someone whose family emigrated from the Bahamas, where they were successful and had pride in their heritage.

As Phillips tells the stories of Williams and Walker, their marriages, and their professional successes and failures, he draws a portrait of the entertainment world from 1903 - 1922, when Williams and Walker were contemporaries of W. C. Fields, Eva Tanguay (who has a relationship with Walker), Ed Wynn, Buster Keaton, and the entire Ziegfeld Follies vaudeville troupe. Having once sworn that he would never don blackface, Williams eventually discovers that with blackface he becomes "somebody else's fantasy"--a "colored" man popular with his white audiences, a buffoon who does not threaten their fantasy of who he is. When he travels to England, where he and Walker perform at Buckingham Palace, he discovers a kind of acceptance that he never achieves in the US.

Though the theme sometimes feels a bit heavy-handed, Phillips provides unusual insights about how much a performer must play to his audience if he is to be successful, and through Bert Williams how demeaning that role can be, personally. Because Williams and Walker are distanced from each other, their wives, and most of the people they work with, however, they are not protagonists with whom the reader will easily identify. In addition, Phillips provides much background, using various points of view and numerous flashbacks, but he sometimes "tells about" the characters, instead of recreating events.

Despite these limitations, Phillips's prose style is stunning. His physical descriptions convey attitude, in addition to giving information, and his keen eye for detail depicts social differences with subtlety. His use of poetic repetition creates moods, and the elegance and formality of his language pay homage to Bert Williams and make of him a tragic hero. By including excerpts from plays, songs, playbills, newspaper blurbs, a quotation from Buster Keaton, a theatre program in which Williams shares the stage with Ed Wynn, and a newspaper interview, he creates a reality for the period and a context for Williams's struggles for acceptance. This fascinating look at America's early entertainment industry is told from a unique perspective and offers important observations about inherent prejudice. n Mary Whipple

"Dancing in the Dark" is a fictionalize portrayal of the life of Bert Williams, an early twentieth century vaudeville and Broadway performer. Mr. Williams immigrates to America from the West Indies at an early age and takes to the stage in an effort to sharpen his talents and support himself. It isn't long before Mr. Williams learns that there is only role that the American audience is interested in seeing a black man play - ragged, dumb, high-stepping comedic "darkie". Early in Mr. Williams' performance career he meets George Walker, a starving street performer, and the two decide to team up and perform with medicine shows. Soon the two form their own company producing and staring in shows that play on Broadway and in Europe. As the success of Williams & Walker builds, the partners differ on the direction in which their performance company should move. Walker is forward thinking and would like for their shows to portray blacks, accurately, as the multifaceted, dignified people he knows them to be. Williams can't seem to move from the blackened faced idiot character that the white audience revels in observing.

Phillips does an admirable job with "Dancing in the Dark" which for this reader serves as a cautionary tale of sorts, warning of the dangers inherent in allowing others to define you. Both Williams and Walker are fully realized characters struggling with internal conflicts frustrations that must certainly have plagued black performers during the vaudevillian era. Phillips explores the affects of Williams' corked face buffoonery on his relationships with others, especially his wife and father, while at the same time examining the slow destruction of a soul trapped by the limitations that others have placed upon it. Williams' success definitely came at a price. How can you maintain a healthy self image when you earn a living that propagates the most negative and humiliating stereotypes of your own race; entertaining the very people who insist on keeping those stereotypes and daft images at the forefront of American minds?

For me, the atmosphere of the novel is somewhat melancholy, although Phillips' prose deftly renders the professional and emotional conflicts central to the novel. The narrative approach, used to deliver the story did create a bit of distance for this reader (third person unknown to first person, was there an interviewer narrating at one point?). However; the author's use of newspaper and magazine reviews drafted in the language and style of the era contributed greatly to the novel's setting. Including song lyrics and playbill text also added to the feel of the period. Most importantly, I learned a little about a period that until this novel I've only had a surface understanding of. I recall a few years back actually seeing some old footage of a corked faced performance and being very embarrassed by it. After this read, I can fully appreciate the embarrassment that the performer might have felt as well. A very enriching read. Enjoy!

Caryl Phillips, in his biographical novel Dancing in the Dark, has chosen to explore the rise of black entertainers during the early part of the twentieth century through the lens of Bert Williams, an elegant West Indies-born vaudevillian, and his partner George Walker. As the first black Americans to star on Broadway, the duo were pioneers in breaking down, and also fortifying, the barriers between whites and blacks.

Told in a collage of narrative from the points-of-view of Williams, Walker, their wives, and their loved ones, and through play segments and newspaper accounts, the novel moves back and forth through time, from glimpses of Williams's childhood and his early days with Walker to both untimely deaths. Phillips's portrayal of Williams, however, is the driving force behind his slim novel. This fictional Williams, both historically accurate and imagined, is torn between entertaining the masses and tossing aside racial stereotypes. The dilemma cripples him, as he knows in his heart that he will never be accepted without his burnt cork make-up and his satiric routines. Publicly, he is elegant and reserved, but privately he is a troubled man, unable to consummate his marriage and unable to communicate his true feelings. The contrast to his outspoken, carousing partner Walker is a poignant one. We know that with the black-face and cakewalk and mumbling English on stage comes a man who needs to break out of his self-constructed cage. Williams is an entertainer; Walker is a would-be activist. Their clash is inevitable.

Although Phillips's episodic method of storytelling sometimes derails the momentum of his story, it is nonetheless a fascinating read. When the author relies heavily on accounts of the day and snippets of many voices, the narrative can seem rushed and incomplete, as the book begins to lack focus. Readers may find themselves wishing that the author had taken more time to develop some of the issues and situations he introduces.

Dancing in the Dark is best when honing in on the conflicted Williams, and, by association, the times around him. Readers of literary fiction will appreciate Phillips's masterful writing and the themes he brings to light. Like Williams, the novel has an elegance and an ambition that is difficult to resist.

Stylistically, this novelization of the life of comedian Bert Williams is a tour de force with its daring use of internal dialog and the mutliple points of view. The language is precise and intimate, although it occasionally lapses into the purple zone.

This book opens up the old discussion that is always debated in historical fiction: how true does it need to be? Phillips does an excellent job in describing the passive nature of Williams, and the fear he (and other Blacks) must have had about whites in that era.

Phillips, however, does a poor job in explaining Williams' need to perform, as well as other aspects of his personality that made him the most successful Black performer of his era.

Additionally, Phillips makes several errors in fact. He makes a theme through the novel on how Williams' proper father disapproved of his career. In reality, his father, a pool hall owner, was very impressed by his successful son. Another theme of the novel, of Williams drinking alone in solitude, is also wrong. Williams was a heavy drinker but always drank with friends and colleagues.

In 1874 Bert Williams was born in the Bahamas, but over a decade later his family relocated to Southern California. Bert performed on stage, but got nowhere as black American roles were limited. However, early in the twentieth century, he became the first black entertainment superstar over the objections of family and friends as they felt strongly he abased himself and the race when he donned blackface paint to play the stereotypical role of a blundering idiot. The white paying audience loved him though he knew he was performing they thought he was himself.

In DANCING IN THE DARK, Caryl Phillips goes behind the scenes to provide a close look Williams playing the "coon" fool alongside his also black Vaudeville partner George Walker. The author shows the psychological effect on the talented but seemingly melancholy superstar by fictionalizing the inner demons and pressures of black American society on Bert Williams and his weird relationship with his white fans. This excellent biographical fiction cleverly places a deep lens on historical racism in comparison to the black identity movements of the 1920s while also enabling the audience to reflect on today's entertainment race relations.

Harriet Klausner

I was looking for Mary Higgins Clark and came up upon this Mary Jane Clark book and thought I'ld give it a try. What a mistake! I found the book unbelievably trite and unoriginal. The story features quite a few girls in one small town who all have eating disorders and cut themselves. After meeting the rest of the characters in the town, I wanted to cut my own wrists! The protagonist was entirely one dimensional. The parents of the teen who was first kidnapped were pathetically weak rendering the whole relationship with the daughter impossibly plodding and unrealistic. The woman one of the kidnap victims babysits for is so boring and selfish that I found myself rooting for the husband to leave her! The author writes as if she is trying to tell us how much she knows about the news business without making it interesting or integrating it into the story therefore sounding altogether preachy without an ounce of vitality. The red herrings were obvious, the ending unsatisfying and the book was altogether an unpleasant read. I would definetely not recommend this book.