A preacher's son

Commonweal, Oct 9, 1998 by Don Wycliff

Early Novels and Stories James Baldwin The Library of America, $35, 970 pp.

Collected Essays James Baldwin The Library of America, $35, 869 pp.

It would be impossible to overstate what James Baldwin meant to me as a young man, a black student in a predominantly white college, in the mid- to late 1960s. Whether or not one agreed with what he was saying at any particular moment, his intelligence was luminous, too obvious to be questioned or doubted. His prose projected a ferocious self-assurance that I could only wish I possessed. Best of all, he was a manifestly successful writer, a genuine stylist of the American language, and his success gave the lie to any who might be inclined to question the ability of a black man to write.

Going back after thirty years and reading some of Baldwin's best-known works produced a surprise for me, however. All of the phrases and passages that I had found most memorable, the ones that had stuck in my mind over the years because they expressed so aptly and powerfully a thought that I knew in my mind and heart to be true--all of those were from his essays. None was from a novel or a short story. Indeed, until I went back and reread Another Country and Go Tell It on the Mountain, I could not recall, except in the sketchiest way, the plot of either. That's far different from the other fiction that I encountered at the same time and that became formative for me--works like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Albert Camus's The Fall, or almost any of Francois Mauriac's novels. It's different even from works that I have come to admire in my adulthood, like Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.

What all this says to me is that Baldwin was a brilliant essayist, and something less than a brilliant novelist. Which is not to say that he was a negligible novelist. Obviously not. Go Tell It on the Mountain was among the hundred best works of twentieth-century English-language fiction named recently by that Random House-Modern Library panel. It must have something to recommend it to have won the endorsement of that club of old fuddy-duddies. But whether brilliant or merely good, Baldwin's fiction, along with his essays, deserves the honor of inclusion in The Library of America. Not to have included it would have been to devalue the entire enterprise, since Baldwin clearly was a very important American novelist.

But it was his essays that stuck to my ribs. Many of them--the best of them--still do. Despite such (now) strange-sounding locutions as "the Negro" and "the Negro problem," Baldwin's prose still has punch, has style, has eloquence. And while many of his observations seem dated, many still ring authentic and accurate.

In the introductory piece in "Notes of a Native Son," which Toni Morrison chose to open the volume of essays, Baldwin observed that, at age twenty-four, after two years of supporting himself by waiting on tables and writing book reviews "about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert," he gave up writing such reviews.

But Baldwin never gave up writing about the issue of race, which was (and is) to say, about the relationship in American society between black people and white people. He couldn't have. It was what he knew about, and as he stated so very forcefully in that same introductory piece: "One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience."

Baldwin's experience was that of a black man trying to find meaning and success and identity in apartheid America. Being black--or Negro, in the vernacular of the time--was a crucial fact of life. So even when he wrote about other things--his strained relationship with his father was a theme in many essays--he wrote about race: His father was the man that he was because he was a black man in a white society; Baldwin related to his father as he did in part because of the influence of white society on him and them; Baldwin ultimately came to appreciate the older man and some of the lessons he had tried to impart about living as a black man in a white society.

It will always be hard for white Americans--and may be now for some African-Americans--to appreciate how overwhelming and oppressive to black people were white people and the structures of segregation they imposed in those preliberation days. Where one lived, worked, traveled, socialized, was educated, sought entertainment, was treated for illness--all that and more--was determined by white society. It was, quite literally, a totalitarian kind of oppression.

It was for that reason that one particular passage resonated with me when I first read it thirty-some years ago in "The Fire Next Time," and resonates still: "Perhaps we were, all of us--pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children--bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about 'the man.' We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not."