James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories

National Review, Feb 9, 1998 by Terry Teachout

James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories (Library of America, 970 pp., $35)

James Baldwin: Collected Essays (Library of America, 869 pp., $35)

Mr. Teachout, Commentary's music critic, is writing a biography of H. L. Mencken.

WHO now reads James Baldwin? Nobody I know, although his books must be selling: all of them are available in mass-market paperback editions, even the later, truly wretched ones. Yet he has long been a point of reference rather than a continuing presence, and younger readers may be surprised to learn that he was at one time the most admired black writer in America, a man whose opinions were ritually solicited by earnest whites eager to know why blacks hated them so much. Then the caravan moved on, and suddenly the author of The Fire Next Time was forgotten but not gone, doomed to spend his later years giving endless interviews (the last resort of the burned-out novelist) and attending meaningless conferences, pretending the world still hung on his every word.

The Library of America has charted the course of Baldwin's long decline in a pair of volumes devoted to his fiction and essays, and one thing they make abundantly clear is that he was always too self-absorbed to be a good novelist. Each of the three novels included in Early Novels and Stories fails in a different way -- Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) is promising but stiff, Giovanni's Room (1956) weepy and implausible, Another Country (1962) noisily hysterical -- but all have in common their author's inability to write convincingly about anyone but himself, thinly disguised. It was only when he ripped off the ill-fitting novelist's mask and spoke his mind in his own tart voice that readers sat up and took notice.

Baldwin began publishing essays in The Nation, The New Leader, and Commentary shortly after World War II. These pieces, collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and reprinted in Collected Essays, have retained the power to startle, both because they are so fabulously well written and because their author, for all his rage at the plight of blacks in postwar America, rejected the constricting ideology of protest, refusing to play anybody's game but his own:

The difficulty then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands and the very real dangers of my social situation. . . . I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them.

But in the Sixties, Baldwin shed his hard-won detachment and plunged head first into the whirlpool of radicalism. The Fire Next Time (1963), his most famous book, is a preposterous farrago of scare-whitey posturing ("A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay") and gassy generalizations ("But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them"). The resulting cocktail briefly intoxicated guilty liberals, but, once the buzz wore off, Baldwin found it impossible to hold the attention of a fickle public drawn to the stronger wine and madder music of such tough guys as Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver. His prose grew shriller and slacker, all to no avail; by 1973, his stock had fallen so low that an editor at Time, calling Baldwin "passe," declined to print a story about him.

Had Baldwin lived longer (he died in 1987), his homosexuality might well have made him fashionable again, but it carried no cachet with the Baptist ministers of the civil-rights movement -- Martin Luther King Jr. kept him at arm's length -- and was no less objectionable to the Black Muslims and Black Panthers with whom he subsequently sought to curry favor. (There is no puritan like a political puritan.) It may well be that the Can-you-top-this? rhetoric of his later years was motivated in part by a need to prove himself to those who, like Cleaver, explicitly challenged his manhood.

But the source of Baldwin's frenzy can just as easily be found in his early essays, in which he is forever arguing that Americans are out of touch with their sexuality, a stock routine beloved of Eisenhower-era homosexual novelists (and one to which his Pentecostal background added extra zip). Just as revealing is the way the young Baldwin, notwithstanding his avowed determination to be more than just "a Negro writer," contrives to foreshadow the wildest excesses of present-day identity politics:

I know . . . that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history . . . I was an interloper; this was not my heritage.