Product Description

'The funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.' This is how W.C. Fields described Bert Williams, the highest-paid entertainer in America in his heyday and someone who counted the King of England and Buster Keaton among his fans. Born in the Bahamas, he moved to California with his family. Too poor to attend Stanford University, he took to life on the stage with his friend George Walker. Together they played lumber camps and mining towns until they eventually made the agonising decision to 'play the coon'. Off-stage, Williams was a tall, light-skinned man with marked poise and dignity; on-stage he now became a shuffling, inept 'nigger' who wore blackface make-up. As the new century dawned they were headlining on Broadway. But the mask was beginning to overwhelm Williams and he sank into bouts of melancholia and heavy drinking, unable to escape the blackface his public demanded. "Dancing in the Dark" is an outstanding novel as much about the tragedy of race and identity, and the perils of reinvention, as it is about the life of one remarkable man.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #67050 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
"'Bert Williams is the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew.' W.C. Fields"

From the Publisher
A brilliant and affecting novel based on the tragic life of a hero of American entertainment.

About the Author
Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts and now lives in London and New York. He has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema and is the author of three works of non-fiction and seven novels. Crossing the River was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and he has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Best of Young British Writers 1993. His most recent book was A Distant Shore which won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize

Customer Reviews

"Can the colored man be himself in 20th century America?"
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 is. 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 often "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. Mary Whipple

spotlight on 'Dancing in the Dark'
In 'Dancing in the Dark' Caryl Phillips describes in novel form the life of the entertainer Bert Williams. If, like me, you had never heard of Williams, the story is a fascinating insight into the life of a successful black entertainer straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. If, also like me, you have read Phillips' other works you will recognise and enjoy his prose and touch. His technique, particularly the frequent changes of narrator and shuffling of sequence, is as effective in this, essentially a historical novel, as in his other, more contemporarily themed novels. I finished the book wishing I could have seen the Bert Williams 'Cakewalk' or experienced his peerless comic timing. Highly recommended, read this and Phillips' other novels in any order you wish.