Iceberg Slim: The Life as Art

by Peter A. Muckley

Published by Dorrance Publishing Co., Inc.
Pittsburgh, PA  2003

Review by John McFadden

I didn't think I'd like this book when I first heard about it, but a reliable friend told me to read it, and I did, and I'm very glad I did. It's the story of the life and writings of Robert Beck (1918-1992), an African American man of exceptional intellectual gifts who wrote and lived and even thrived for many years in a Chicago ghetto as "Iceberg Slim," a sometimes pimp, sometimes convict, and who came of political and moral age during the civil rights movement.

He might easily be considered the father of "street lit" or "hip-hop lit" or any of the half-dozen other names used these days to describe the raw, roughly told, best-selling novels of extreme urban survival in the modern American ghetto. I should say that author Muckley does not characterize Slim as a writer of street lit; the characterization is mine, but it fits. To be fair, the genre was still more than 30 years away from being a genre back when Slim began publishing and selling millions of books, but to me that's all the more reason to give this book a serious look.

I think as street lit grows in influence (and it's growing), Slim's importance will be realized, and Muckley's book will be at the top of everybody's short list. It just reads that way. It illuminates the graphic literary artistry of Iceberg Slim in a way that invites exploration. What you thought would put you off—the tales of violence, racism, sexism, poverty of ghetto life—while real and really disturbing, become, through Muckley's book, the swirling backdrop for an extraordinary story of transcendence of all of it through deeply engaged writing. Using plot outlines, biographical vignettes, photos, rock-solid scholarship, a deep affinity for and understanding of his subject, and consistently assured and lively writing (in addition, evidently, to calling on his own years living in slums), Muckley takes you into the deep ghetto of late 20th century America and lets you feel a little of what it's like to live there day to day, grow up there, and look down the road at living there until you die under the conditions that millions still do today, in the 21st century, in the wealthiest nation on earth.

And in methodical fashion, looking at Slim's work book by book, essay by essay, and weaving biography as he goes, Muckley carries you through the world of Iceberg Slim manifest by Slim himself and his family and fellow travelers, and by his vibrant, vital, struggling fictional characters, who work through his real-life challenges in their fictionalized lives.

Muckley shows the evolution and merging of the writer and his art in many telling and dramatic vignettes. Particularly memorable for me was how Robert Beck came to become Iceberg Slim, which occurred in real life in the natural course of an informal ghetto naming "ceremony," which Muckley contextualizes, in the telling, in a way that humanizes Slim and all of the people who move through this sometimes inhuman world.

There are two things to be prepared for: (1) Though the writing quality is uniformly sparkling, first rate, the typesetting is less good, which might annoy the persnickety reader (like me). The flaws are minor, not overnumerous, and they never interfere with meaning, but don't be put off when you see them (actually, as I moved through it, I found that they actually added to the "street lit" feel of the thing). (2) The book is very opinionated politically, and I found myself disagreeing with some of its leftist positions, even though I consider myself left of center.

However, the vitality of expression informed by these stong politics served more to invigorate for me rather than distract because it's the story of an extremely intelligent man who became very political as he matured and used subversive politics as very moral survival means in his almost incomprehensibly harsh world. I highly recommend this book. It gives you a glimpse of an American life that most of us, if we're lucky, will never see, and it traces the life and work of an exceptional man who not only survived it, but managed to turn the intensity of it into art. It's an extraordinary book.

Copyright © John McFadden 2004