Fifty Years Ago in
February
Fifty years ago, F. W. Dupee reviewed The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and John Thompson reviewed Sissie by John A. Williams in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 1,
No. 1, February 1, 1963. With Richard Wright being dead and Ralph Ellison
playing possum, Baldwin and Williams were the leading black male writers of
1963, competing with Martin Luther King, Jr. for the ears of American Negroes. John Oliver Killens was doing what he did
best; he was writing take-no-prisoners prose and fiction and waiting for
retarded Americans to catch up with him. A young person named LeRoi Jones was
swimming with genuine conviction toward fame.
One did hear of Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, Margaret
Walker, and Lorraine Hansberry in 1963, but black women writers had to wait a
full decade until the Phillis Wheatley Festival at Jackson State University,
conceived by Margaret Walker, accorded them overdue attention and secular
apotheosis.
Dupee, a founding
editor of The Partisan Review, was a
white male in extremis, and he
struggled like a Hebrew slave to give an Egyptian a fair reading. Thompson was
an English sociologist, and his three point tendentious statement on Williams’s
novel was about as good as one could
expect from a white male British sociologist who might have better spent his
ink on a rigorous study of how swiftly the British Empire was dissolving in
1963.
Fifty years later, one finds it most bracing to read the
comments of Dupee and Thompson and to have confirmed one’s suspicion that “white” white male writers are perpetually blessed by
God to be wrongheaded.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. February
10, 2013
James Baldwin and the
“Man”
The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin
The Dial Press, $3.50
As a writer of polemical essays on the Negro
question James Baldwin has no equals. He probably has, in fact, no real
competitors. The literary role he has taken on so deliberately and played with
so agile an intelligence is one that no white writer could possibly imitate and
that few Negroes, I imagine, would wish to embrace in toto. Baldwin
impresses me as being the Negro in extremis, a virtuoso of ethnic
suffering, defiance, and aspiration. His role is that of the man whose
complexion constitutes his fate, and not only in a society poisoned by
prejudice but, it sometimes seems, in general. For he appears to have received
a heavy dose of existentialism; he is at least half-inclined to see the Negro
question in the light of the Human Condition. So he wears his color as Hester
Prynne did her scarlet letter, proudly. And like her he converts this thing, in
itself so absurdly material, into a form of consciousness, a condition of
spirit. Believing himself to have been branded as different from and inferior
to the white majority, he will make a virtue of his situation. He will be
different and in his own way be better.
His major essays—for example, those collected
in Notes of a Native Son—show the extent to which he is able to be
different and in his own way better. Most of them were written, as other such
pieces generally are, for the magazines, some obviously on assignment. And
their subjects—a book, a person, a locale, an encounter—are the inevitable
subjects of magazine essays. But Baldwin’s way with them is far from
inevitable. To apply criticism “in depth” to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is, for
him, to illuminate not only a book, an author, an age, but a whole strain in a
country’s culture. Similarly with those routine themes, the Paris expatriate
and Life With Father, which he treats in “Equal In Paris” and the title piece
of Notes of a Native Son, and which he wholly transfigures. Of course
the transfiguring process in Baldwin’s essays owes something to the fact that
the point of view is a Negro’s, an outsider’s, just as the satire of American
manners in Lolita and Morte d’Urban depends on their being
written from the angle of, respectively, a foreign-born creep and a Catholic
priest. But Baldwin’s point of view in his essays is not merely that of the
generic Negro. It is, as I have said, that of a highly stylized Negro, a role
which he plays with an artful and zestful consistency and which he expresses in
a language distinguished by clarity, brevity, and a certain formal elegance. He
is in love, for example, with syntax, with sentences that mount through clearly
articulated stages to a resounding and clarifying climax and then gracefully
subside. For instance this one, from The Fire Next Time:
Girls, only slightly
older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children
of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of
which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their
rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their
heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices.
Nobody else in democratic America writes
sentences like this anymore. It suggests the ideal prose of an ideal literary
community, some aristocratic France of one’s dreams. This former Harlem boy has
undergone his own incredible metamorphosis.
His latest book, The Fire Next Time,
differs in important ways from his earlier work in the essay. Its subjects are
less concrete, less clearly defined; to a considerable extent he has exchanged
prophecy for criticism, exhortation for analysis, and the results for his mind
and style are in part disturbing. The Fire Next Time gets its title from
a slave song: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign,/No more water the fire next
time.” But this small book with the incendiary title consists of two
independent essays, both in the form of letters. One is a brief affair entitled
“My Dungeon Shook” and addressed to “My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary
of the Emancipation.” The ominous promise of this title is fulfilled in the
text. Between the hundred-year-old anniversary and the fifteen-year-old nephew
the disparity is too great even for a writer of Baldwin’s rhetorical powers.
The essay reads like some specimen of “public speech” as practiced by MacLeish
or Norman Corwin. It is not good Baldwin.
The other, much longer, much more significant
essay appeared first in a pre-Christmas number of The New Yorker, where
it made, understandably, a sensation. It is called “Down At the Cross; Letter
From a Region of My Mind.” The subtitle should be noted. Evidently the essay is
to be taken as only a partial or provisional declaration on Baldwin’s part, a
single piece of his mind. Much of it, however, requires no such appeal for
caution on the reader’s part. Much of it is unexceptionably first-rate. For
example, the reminiscences of the writer’s boyhood, which form the lengthy
introduction. Other of Baldwin’s writings have made us familiar with certain
aspects of his Harlem past. Here he concentrates on quite different things: the
boy’s increasing awareness of the abysmally narrow world of choice he inhabits
as a Negro, his attempt to escape a criminal existence by undergoing a
religious conversion and becoming at fifteen a revivalist preacher, his
discovery that he must learn to “inspire fear” if he hopes to survive the fear
inspired in him by “the man”—the white man.
In these pages we come close to understanding
why he eventually assumed his rather specialized literary role. It seems to
have grown naturally out of his experience of New York City. As distinct from a
rural or small-town Negro boy, who is early and firmly taught his place, young
Baldwin knew the treacherous fluidity and anonymity of the metropolis, where
hidden taboos and unpredictable animosities lay in wait for him and a trip to
the 42nd Street Library could be a grim adventure. All this part of the book is
perfect; and when Baldwin finally gets to what is his ostensible subject, the
Black Muslims or Nation of Islam movement, he is very good too. As good, that
is, as possible considering that his relations with the movement seem to have
been slight. He once shared a television program with Malcolm X, “the
movement’s second-in-command,” and he paid a brief and inconclusive visit to
the first-in-command, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and his entourage at the
party’s headquarters in Chicago. (Muhammad ranks as a prophet; to him the Black
Muslim doctrines were “revealed by Allah Himself.”) Baldwin reports the Chicago
encounter in charming detail and with what looks like complete honesty. On his
leaving the party’s rather grand quarters, the leader insisted on providing him
with a car and driver to protect him “from the white devils until he gets
wherever it is he is going.” Baldwin accepted, he tells us, adding wryly: “I
was, in fact, going to have a drink with several white devils on the other side
of town.”
He offers some data on the Black Muslim
movement, its aims and finances. But he did a minimum of homework here. Had he
done more he might at least have provided a solid base for the speculative
fireworks the book abounds in. To cope thoroughly with the fireworks in short
space, or perhaps any space, seems impossible. Ideas shoot from the book’s
pages as the sparks fly upward, in bewildering quantity and at random. I don’t
mean that it is all dazzle. On the cruel paradoxes of the Negro’s life, the
failures of Christianity, the relations of Negro and Jew, Baldwin is often
superb. But a lot of damage is done to his argument by his indiscriminate raids
on Freud, Lawrence, Sartre, Genet, and other psychologists, metaphysicians and
melodramatists. Still more damage is done by his refusal to draw on anyone so
humble as Martin Luther King and his fellow-practitioners of non-violent
struggle.
For example: “White Americans do not believe
in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.” But
suppose one or two white Americans are not intimidated. Suppose someone
coolly asks what it means to “believe in death.” Again: “Do I really want
to be integrated into a burning house?” Since you have no other, yes; and the
better-disposed firemen will welcome your assistance. Again: “A vast amount of
the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the
white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white.” You
exaggerate the white man’s consciousness of the Negro. Again: “The real reason
that non-violence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes…is that white men do
not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.” Of
course they don’t, especially their lives. Moreover, this imputing of “real
reasons” for the behavior of entire populations is self-defeating, to put it
mildly. One last quotation, this time a regular apocalypse:
In order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the
world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reexamine
themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be
sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to
justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.
Since whole cultures have never been known to
“discard nearly all their assumptions” and yet remain intact, this amounts to
saying that any essential improvement in Negro-white relations, and thus in the
quality of American life, is unlikely.
So much for the fireworks. What damage, as I
called it, do they do to the writer and his cause—which is also the concern of
plenty of others? When Baldwin replaces criticism with prophecy, he manifestly
weakens his grasp of his role, his style, and his great theme itself. And to
what end? Who is likely to be moved by such arguments, unless it is the more
literate Black Muslims, whose program Baldwin specifically rejects as both
vindictive and unworkable. And with the situation as it is in Mississippi and elsewhere—dangerous,
that is, to the Negro struggle and the whole social order—is not a writer of
Baldwin’s standing obliged to submit his assertions to some kind of pragmatic
test, some process whereby their truth or untruth will be gauged according to
their social utility? He writes: “The Negroes of this country may never be able
to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and
ring down the curtain on the American dream.” I should think that the
anti-Negro extremists were even better placed than the Negroes to precipitate
chaos, or at least to cause a lot of trouble; and it is unclear to me how The
Fire Next Time, in its madder moments, can do nothing except inflame the
former and confuse the latter. Assuming that a book can do anything to
either.
New Novels
Eternal Fire
by Calder Willingham
Vanguard, $6.95
Occasion for Loving
by Nadine Gordimer
Viking, $5.00
Sissie
by John A. Williams
Farrar, Straus, $4.50
Calder Willingham has always been a
spellbinder, and in his sixth novel, Eternal Fire, he is absolutely
shameless about it. He has always been a knowing sort of fellow, too. He knows
how thing work, how people talk, he knows the insides and outsides and the
undersides. You won’t catch him up anywhere.
But, if there is one thing he knows best of
all, it is his reader. Oh, the shameless tricks he plays on that reader’s
nerves! Such cliffs, believe me, have not for years been hung from. All the way
between the first page and, literally, the last page of this long novel the
story races on cheerfully, dreadfully, from foreboding to disaster to
foreboding. And because of this knowing way about things that Calder Willingham
has, the reader does not have to forgive, as we usually have to for the sake of
excitement and surprise, quantities of false morality and real ignorance. The
novel is melodrama, but we are not required to transform ourselves either into
schoolgirls or sadists to enjoy it. The novel is something of a fairy tale,
too, but once we have accepted that premise, we find, I believe, that to our
most instructed consciousness the surprises are truly surprising, the
depravities of the villain truly outrageous, the hearts of the innocent as we
feel their beats here are as the hearts of little birds caught in rough hands.
In addition to being a fairy tale, Eternal
Fire is all the Southern novels there are, done up in one master recipe—Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, Light in August, and yes, even a little lick of that lollipop,
To Kill a Mockingbird. The setting is that familiar Southern small town,
the time, the nostalgic days of the thirties,. The heroine is the town
Cinderella, Laurie Mae Lytle: young, poor, beautiful, sweet. The Prince is
Randolph Sudderland Shepherdson III, young, rich, handsome, sweet. these two
are about to marry, imagining that their only problems are a little opposition
from the Prince’s guardian, and the stirrings of passion that trouble their
old-fashioned innocence. But the wicked Judge is bringing into action against
them all the forces of evil, in the person of Harry Diadem. This sublimely
wicked young man, who was brought up in that mean Tennessee orphanage with
Faulkner’s Joe Christmas, has the body of a Greek statue, the eyebrows of
Mephistopeles, and the abilities as a seducer that would have made Don Juan,
had he heard of them, ashamed to send off a valentine after that. To defend
Cinderella and the Prince there are only their own two hearts and Cinderella’s
pet dwarf, feeble-minded but in a pinch as strong as King Kong. Theft,
blackmail, incest, suicide, and murder ensue, complete with a classic
double-double-crossing trial scene.
It is all very grand, struggle upon struggle; good and evil become
powerfully entangled with one another. Shameless as Calder Willingham may be,
though, I do not like to think that he has not somewhere drawn the line. I
believe he calls it quits just on the safe side of allegory. He seems much too
good-humored and sensible to go over that edge. Furthermore, although the plot
turns on questions of color, and there are Negroes and racists here embroiled,
the theme of black man and white man is not of much real moment in Eternal
Fire. One could make a moral from it if he wished, a version of the current
much-moralized involvement of the black man, sex, and the white man’s failed
instinct. But, again, basically Calder Willingham is too good-humored to do
more than let this be there in the book as one more of the things he knows so
well and brings so gleefully to life in his story.
The black man in the white man’s society is of
very much moment in Nadine Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving. This, her
sixth book of fiction, takes place like most of her work in her country of
South Africa. The story concerns two couples of the Johannesburg intellectual
class and a black South African artist. Jessie and Tom Stilwell supplement his
university pay by boarding in their big old house the young newly-married Boaz
Davis and his Ann. Boaz has lost interest in composing and is trying to collect
the ancient tribal music of Africa before it disappears. Ann is an adventurous
young lady who has to try everything once. After the fashion of their kind in
Johannesburg, these four are much in the company of Africans.
The African in the story is Gideon Shibalo. He
has been awarded a fellowship to study painting in Rome, his government has
denied him a passport, he is in a slump over it. Ann tries a love affair with
him. They all accept this, even the husband, on high sexual and racial
principles. The affair gets serious and the lovers plan to run off together.
That is the story.
In the telling, the story is all quiet
intelligence and art. It is seen chiefly through the eyes of Jessie Stilwell, a
good-willed, middle-class intelligent woman. She lives the familiar life of the
more-or-less successful and more-or-less worthily occupied middle class, the
life which seems somehow to have gone hollow the world over today. Jessie’s
life is hollow until she gets some curious fulfillment from her relation to the
love of Ann and Gideon.
The story itself moves rather dully until the
black man appears, although everything is well told and beautifully understood.
Author and narrator are absolutely full of observations and reflective
generalizations, good ones, too. (Some little thing one day reassures Jessie
when she has been upset: “It had the same effect on her as the sight of one’s
feet in familiar shoes may have when one sits down rather drunk, among the
press at a party.”) Nadine Gordimer is very intelligent. These wise statements
connect her characters—and they aren’t really very vivid, these people—with
humanity. But they also convey a certain weariness as of foregone actions and
feelings.
Without the drama of Johannesburg
white-and-black behind it, this could be only another chronicle of the suburbs.
As the story itself needs Gideon, the people in the story need him. The
Stilwells and Davises, emancipated and intelligent, are dead on their feet.
Family love is not enough. Jessie Stilwell, who knows too much about sexual
love to believe in it very much—as do all the people in this story—yet gets
caught up in it. And for its sake the whole show must go on, applecart and all.
The whole show doesn’t go, of course, and the system destroys the love of Ann
and Gideon.
Is this the final worst thing about it, worse
than the black children starving so the white masters may dine well? Yet did
not the system create this occasion for loving, did it not, this system, at the
same time make Mrs. Stilwell’s heart empty? We know that for the most intense
kinds of love, the occasion must be something like that which Johannesburg
affords. Where love is most utterly forbidden it is most, at every moment, a
possibility. In its quiet and thoughtful way, Occasion for Loving moves
among the troubling depths of these questions. If it has a conclusion, it is
the author’s own statement that one day her heroine will be out blowing up
power stations. No more questions, then, when the blood bath comes.
John A. William’s Sissie is a good
novel about an American Negro family. This is a tendentious statement in
several ways. First, I think one of the reasons the novel is good is that it is
about Negroes: in novels, subject matter counts. We read novels partly to
confirm or to extend our own experience. And all of us need desperately to
extend our knowledge of the life of American Negroes. Naturally, I do not
exclude Negroes when I say “us.”
Second, I assume that this knowledge can be
extended by a novel like Sissie. There are those who would contend that
competent documents in the conventional forms of modern fiction cannot serve to
discover or to convey this experience. They say this experience is unique and
demands unique forms, developed like jazz, from Negro culture itself. Perhaps
these forms may indeed be developed. But I would hope that the experience,
though extreme, is human and can be made available to other human beings in the
form that has, for modern Western society, worked best.
The experience recorded in Sissie is
archetypal, that of the Negro family in the North cruelly hurt by American
society. This society condemns most Negroes to the worst consequences of its
reckless refusal to share among its members the fantastic riches they produce.
For many of them this means, simply, death. Children die of this deprivation.
The survivors are scarred, by the brutal struggle to live, by the guilt of
survival, by the lunatic sadism of the American racial system. Sissie
shows this directly and clearly. It is not sentimental and it is not
apocalyptic. It records the facts with honesty, modesty, and craft. This novel
will remain as one of the permanent records of the deadly shame of the America
we live in. No solution. The power stations here, as in the Union of South
Africa, remain intact.
