Dark Comedy

The photograph’s image was once considered hilarious. Now it’s just plain disturbing: A black man has applied cork to his face to make it blacker still, and ludicrously inflated his lips with white paint. The performer plays the “coon.”

The photo of vaudeville-era entertainer Bert Williams (1874-1922) was enough to set West Indian novelist Caryl Phillips on a ten-year mission to learn about the performer’s doubt-fraught, tragedy-ridden life. Phillips reads from and discusses the final product, Dancing in the Dark, as part of the InPrint Brown Reading Series this week.

Bert Williams was a real person — in fact, he achieved fame and success nearly unprecedented for a black man in his time — but Dancing in the Dark is a novel, not a biography. “He seems to have spent a great amount of time at the height of his fame making sure there was no paper trail,” Phillips says. “That’s good for a novelist. There’s lots of space to imagine.”

And imagine Phillips did, presenting a Williams whose identity, caught in the maelstrom of racial tensions in turn-of-the-century America, is always in tortuous flux. Here is Williams perplexed as he wipes the cork from his face, self-conscious as he drinks champagne with Florenz Ziegfeld and Fanny Brice, embarrassed as his father watches his act, distant as his wife struggles to keep their marriage alive.

One thing missing from the book about the comedic performer is, notably, comedy. Phillips gives two explanations for this. First, he says, “Let’s focus on what makes him universal: The person that has the world at his feet is often the saddest person in the world.” Second, what we find funny is always changing: The humor of Williams’s dancing black fool is utterly incomprehensible to the modern reader. “We just have to assume that he was funny in his time,” Phillips says.

The book also contains little traditional dialogue. Instead, Phillips relates his characters’ thoughts declaratively, mincing spoken word in favor of deep analytical description. The result is a sense of exclusive access for the reader. “Traditional dialogue is very external,” Phillips says. Instead, he opted for a style that suggested “something more interior and slightly more weirdly personal.”

Besides Williams’s thin paper trail, Phillips’s own interests precluded him from writing the book as biography: “I don’t think I have the skills and patience that’s necessary,” he says. “Novelists just like to imagine and hope that they’re right.”

Phillips himself has left quite a paper trail; Dancing in the Dark is the 47-year-old’s 11th book and eighth novel. The St. Kitts-born, London-raised writer also teaches English at Yale. And his preference for prose fiction belies his accomplishments as a nonfiction writer for magazines, documentaries and television.

But while his success is not nearly as conflicted as Williams’s, it doesn’t mean his work is easy. “The problems of sitting down to try to write a book are exactly the same as they were when I sat down to try and write a book 20 years ago,” says Phillips. “I assumed that it would get easier with time. Unfortunately that’s not been the case.”

It seems Williams would understand.