The angry sorrow of a life on the stage

Dancing in the Dark
By Caryl Phillips
Knopf, 211 pp., $23.95

W. C. Fields called him the funniest man he ever saw and the saddest man he ever knew. He was speaking of Bert Williams, the black comedian who in the first quarter of the 20th century enjoyed a richly rewarded success on the New York stage.

Enjoyed and, as Fields's double-edged tribute made plain, suffered. In a troupe he led with his black partner and straight man, George Walker, and later as a Ziegfeld star, Williams played the shambling zany -- part dumb and part sly -- created in the minstrel shows of the 19th century by white performers in blackface.

Now it was to be two black men in blackface. ''Two Real Coons," Williams and Walker billed themselves when they arrived in New York in 1895.

Even a reviewer has a hard time writing down a joke that lies somewhere between abhorrent and cosmic. The latter inasmuch as, nearly a century later and with Eugene Ionesco's and Jean Genet's Theater of the Absurd intervening, our impulse is to think in terms of grotesque satire.

In his novel based on Williams's life and career, Caryl Phillips has something different in mind: a challenging contradiction and an angry sorrow. This West Indies-born author of ''Cambridge," ''A State of Independence," and ''A Distant Shore" has written searchingly and without easy answers about the dilemmas in a slavery heritage that struggles for terms of dignity and pride within the heritage of the masters.

''Dancing in the Dark" drapes the thinnest of fictional veils over the Williams story. Its strength is in its embattled paradoxes, the unsparing ferocity with which Phillips wields them, and the compassion on whose behalf the ferocity is used.

Williams, born in the West Indies, was raised in California. As a teenager he joined up with a traveling assortment of medicine and burlesque shows. In Chicago he met Walker, and after much hardship and experimenting the two developed the roles that would bring them success in New York.

The author tells these events in a blurred and sometimes disjointed fashion. He can be a polished writer, but in recent years he has adopted a deliberate raggedness of narration and sequence, one that makes use, as a reviewer has written, of fragmented narrative for polemic purposes.

In this case the intention is to express the extreme disorientation of individual success in a social framework that, in the early 1900s, went far beyond discrimination into shameless mockery and active hostility. The intention is not always achieved; fictionally the book is something of a fog.

Through it we read of the performers' triumphs, and of the suffering of their wives: Williams's from her husband's asexual apathy and depression, Walker's from her husband's profligate randiness (he died from tertiary syphilis). We read of a British royal performance, after which the hapless future Edward VII asked to be taught to cakewalk. His legs (like his reign) were too short for high kicks; he settled for slides and sidesteps.

The British reviewers loved the visitors, though some complained that their show wasn't black enough. And this leads to the real pith, the rending engagement of a book that might possibly have displayed its bite and terror more clearly as an extended essay than as fiction.

Not black enough. It was the hard paradox that Phillips engages with, one he sees as enduring to this day. Both performers, as the author writes them, were fully conscious that blackface clowning fed into the demeaning stereotype their white customers were hungry for. Not, perhaps, because they entirely believed it but because it pleased them to think they did.

And here, the contradictions. Walker deplored the blackface clowning, and he organized spectacles that emphasized African-based dance and pageantry, though not very successfully. Williams insisted that it was the clowning that brought in the audience; they were, after all, entertainers. Yet Walker would eloquently defend what they had accomplished: a black-owned enterprise with dozens of black performers on its payroll. Williams, offstage, drank heavily and silently.

Phillips makes his question clear. At what price do blacks thrive in a society dominated by whites? To what extent are they demeaned by playing to the stereotyping, even if this is far less blatant than it was in the early 1900s? And is it demeaning, after all, to get the best of the jungle -- the white jungle, that is?

Phillips goes on -- by implication in the book, more explicitly in an accompanying interview -- to speak of today's black rap artists as heirs to the performance minstrelsy of Williams and Walker. The comparison is startling and perhaps off base; yet Phillips sees a connecting thread. Today, as 100 years ago, black artists are offering a stereotype to a market that is largely white and that finds gratification in an easy image, one that flaunts prideful dangerousness instead of shambling complaisance, yet is not altogether truer for all that.

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.