University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
1968
James Baldwin's Mountain
Flossie Gertrude Pyle Lutz
University of Iowa
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Lutz, Flossie Gertrude Pyle. "James Baldwin's Mountain." MA (Master of Arts) thesis, University of Iowa, 1968.
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Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority
Commons
JAMES BALDWIN’S MOUNTAIN
by
Flossie Gertrude Pyle Lutz
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
in the Department of English
in the Graduate College of The
University of Iowa
February, 1968
Thesis supervisor:
Associate Professor Paul Baender
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
MASTER’S THESIS
\
This is to certify that the Master's Thesis of
Flossie Gertrude Pyle Lutz
with a major in English has been approved by the
Examining Committee as satisfactory for the
thesis requirement for the Master of Arts degree
at the convocation of February, 1968.
Thesis committee:
Thesis supervisor
M em ber
Member
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I wish to express my sincere appreciation to
Professor Paul Baender and the members of the committee
for their supervision of this thesis and for the many
helpful suggestions which they have made.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION..........................................
1
Chapter
I. BACKGROUNDS....................................
k
II.
THE ESSAYS ....................................
15
III.
SELECTED SHORT STORIES ........................
35
IV.
THE NOVELS ....................................
70
I.
II.
III.
Go Tell It On The Mountain ................
Giovanni's Room............................
Another Country............................
70
78
83
V.
THE PLAYS......................................
94
VI.
CONCLUSION ....................................
100
FOOTNOTES ............................................
108
BIBLIOGRAPHY..........................................
119
iii
1
INTRODUCTION
Baldwin's literary career has extended over a period
ol nearly two decades, during which time he has published
three novels, many short stories, two plays, three collections
of essays, and numerous uncollected essays and reviews.
Mr.
Baldwin has served in various other capacities as a spokesman
for his race.
He is a member of the national advisory board
of the Congress of Racial Equality and has lectured on its
behalf, at times on television.
Mr. Baldwin's writing career began in high school,
where he worked on a school literary magazine.
After his
graduation from De Witt Clinton High School in New York City
in 1942, he worked at various jobs during the day and wrote
in the evenings.
While working on his first novel, Go Tell It
On The Mountain, he met Richard Wright, who was influential
in securing for him in 1945 the Eugene F. Saxton Memorial
Trust Award.
In 1948 he received a Rosenwald Fellowship, which
enabled him to go to Paris.
He remained in Europe for nearly
ten years, where he completed the major portion of his pub­
lished works.
During this time Mr. Baldwin was the recipient of numer­
ous other awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954,
the Partisan Review Fellowship in 1956, the National Institute
2
of Arts and Letters Award in 1956, and a Ford Grant-in-Aid in
1959.
In 1961 his collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name,
was cited as one of the outstanding books of the year by the
Notable Books Council of the American Library Association.
During the same year this work also received a certificate of
recognition from the National Conference of Christians and
Jews.
Mr. Baldwin's work has been received by the critics
and the reading public with varying degrees of approbation,
ranging in tone from extravagant praise to trenchant dis­
paragement.
Much of the commentary about his work has dwelt
on his choice of subject matter rather than on the literary
merits of his work.
Up to this writing, no book-length study
of his works has been made, although in recent years several
extended studies have appeared in literary magazines.
However,
in the words of Mr. Wallace Graves, writing in the March 1964
issue of the C.L.A. Journal, "The question at hand is whether
Baldwin is a major novelist whose creations will continue to
live beyond the essays, beyond the local conditions which
created them, or whether he is popular now because he is an
intelligent and lucid Negro living at a time when current
events have provided him with an unusually wide and curious
audience for his fiction."^
The purpose of this thesis is to examine Baldwin's
major works and to examine a representative selection of the
critical essays about his work for the purpose of defining
3
Mr. Baldwin's position among his contemporaries.
This study,
it is hoped, will be able to trace the thematic relationships
among his works, to determine the esthetic value of his work,
to trace his development as a writer, and to assess his
achievement up to the present time.
In any study of Baldwin's work, the critic must con­
sider the relationship between the author's work and his
environment and the development of his sense of reality, a
matter of great concern to Baldwin in all of his writing.
Therefore, Chapter I contains a brief survey of the circum­
stances and the influences which seem to be related to the
problems of Negro writers in general and of Mr. Baldwin in
particular:
his aims and attitudes toward his writing; his
attitude toward his race; and, most important of all, his
attitude toward himself.
Chapters II through V will contain
a discussion of his essays and his fiction with an individual
treatment of each of his three novels.
The concluding chap­
ter, Chapter VI, will assess the current criticism of his work
and the contribution of Mr. Baldwin’s works to the contemporary
literary scene.
4
CHAPTER I
BACKGROUNDS
Like young John Grimes in his first novel, Go Tell It
On The Mountain, James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem and
lived there during his childhood.
His parents, like the
Grimeses, had an essentially rural Southern background which
did not fit them to cope with urban life in the North.
Young
Baldwin, describing himself in "Autobiographical Notes," from
Notes of a Native Son, says that he was raised by the stand­
ards of the church, and he had a short career as a child
preacher beginning at age fourteen.^
His discovery of the
inadequacy of his father's religion to solve the problems of
the Northern ghetto prompted his decision to abandon his
preaching career when he was seventeen.
His loss of faith
was a major factor in the unhappy relationship between him
and his father, described in several of the essays.
But the
Calvinistic conception of the nature of God and man found in
the pages of his works testifies to the lasting influence of
his early religious training.
His interest in books and writing, of which his mother
approved, began at an early age.
He says that he began plotting
novels at the time he learned to read.
He is the oldest of
nine children and while he helped to care for the younger
5
children, he read constantly, reading over and over Uncle Tom's
Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities.
His earliest writing consisted
of a short story published in a church paper and of writing
he did in high school for the school literary magazine.
Following his graduation from De Witt Clinton High
School, New York City, in 1942, he went to work on defense
projects in Belle Meade, New Jersey.
His first awareness of
what it is to be a Negro w as acquired in New Jersey and is
graphically described in his essay "Notes of a Native Son."
It was here that he began to hate himself and the white world,
and the impact of this experience forced him to leave America
in 1948 to try to find himself in Europe.
Following his father's death in 1943, he went to live
in Greenwich Village, working at a variety of odd jobs while
trying to write during his free time.
During this period of
his life he met Richard Wright, who read the opening pages of
his first novel and liked it well enough to assist Baldwin in
obtaining a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Award in 1945.
also helped Baldwin get the fellowships which enabled him to
go to Europe.
Perhaps the individual who has had the most influence
upon James Baldwin is Richard Wright, whose encouragement
strengthened his determination to become a writer.
Besides,
as Baldwin writes in the essay "Alas, Poor Richard," "he had
2
been my idol since high school."
Later, when Baldwin went
He
6
to Paris, he came to know Wright intimately.
Unfortunately,
the relationship between the two writers was marred by the
misunderstanding caused when Baldwin's essay, "Everybody's
Protest Novel," was published in Zero in 19U9.
Wright felt
that Baldwin had betrayed him in attacking the protest writing
found in Wright's Native Son.
Although the disagreement
changed the relationship, Baldwin readily acknowledges in
his essays that his debt to Wright is enormous.
After living in Europe for nearly ten years, his
return to the United States in 1957 brought about his direct
involvement with civil rights issues.
His experience in the
South became the subjects of several essays, and the death of
Medgar Evers led to the writing of his second play, Blues for
Mister Charlie.
Without intending to do so, he became an
unofficial spokesman for his people.
He is a member of the
national advisory board of the Congress of Racial Equality
and has lectured on the West Coast and in Harlem for the
benefit of CORE.
In Paris in August, 1963, he opened the
civil rights appeal at the American Church to demonstrate the
support of Americans abroad for the March on Washington move­
ment.
In Africa in December, 1963, he was guest of honor at
the celebration of Kenya's independence.
He has also been
active on behalf of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear
Policy.
Realizing that his future as an author was being
seriously jeopardized by the demands upon his time and person,
7
Baldwin returned to Europe, where he is presently engaged in
writing a novel and other works.
The period of history during which Baldwin has pro­
duced the bulk of his work can be classified as a period of
controversy and revolution.
The duality of the relation of
a writer to his environment can be expressed thus :
the writer
is a product of his environment and he is also a shaper of the
world in which he lives.
Baldwin's case.
This fact is particularly true in
His writing of the essays dealing with his
personal experiences testifies to the truth of the first
statement.
And his powerful essays on behalf of civil rights
issues have been influential in gaining greater freedom for
his race.
The topical nature of part of his work will provide
useful sources of information to the historian and the sociolo­
gist making a study of race relations during this period of
history.
From a literary standpoint, James Baldwin has lived
through a period which has been characterized by change.
For
many writers, as John W. Aldridge points out in After the Lost
Generation, "Loss is no longer the spiritual climate of the
3
age, but the chaos of loss is still its typical material."
Aldridge also points out that
The novel has consequently been forced to concern
itself with more and more marginal aberrant subjects
in its unceasing effort to keep alive and to discover
fresh materials for drama. The movement from social
manners to social crisis to perversion to the stunted
domestic epiphany may be seen in this sense to represent
8
the novel's adjustment to the gradual failure of
dramatic possibilities in our culture.
However much one may disagree with Aldridge about the possi­
bilities for finding subject matter for novels in the con­
temporary scene, one must agree that Baldwin's choice of
materials, to some degree, follows the pattern he describes.
What remains to be seen is whether Baldwin will be able to
achieve the aesthetic distance which will enable him to
utilize fully the heritage of Negro experience in America.
Although the position of the Negro has improved in
many respects:
more Negroes are seen in television programs
and in movies, and Negro writers are finding it easier to get
their works published, the concern of the Negro writer with
aesthetic problems is not his only concern.
The Negro author
continues to look at his problems from the viewpoint of a
second-class citizen.
Legislation alone has not created the
kind of climate that is conducive to the creation of aesthetic
fiction.
Robert Bone, in his recent succinct study of the
Negro novel, found that "of sixty-two novelists writing between
1853 and 1952, forty, or two-thirds, have published only one
novel.
Eleven more have published only two novels; only eleven
have published more than two."~*
Since 1952, more Negroes are
trying to write fiction, but they continue to feel that they
have problems which the white writer does not have to face.
One of these is the matter of categorization which limits the
recognition of the literary value of Negro writing.
In 1963,
9
John A. Williams, author of Night Song and Sissie, in a dis­
cussion of Negro writers' problems, declared,
Almost without fail, a novel written by a Negro is said
to be one of anger, hatred, rage, or protest . . . .
These little tickets deprive that novel of any ability
it may have to voice its concern for all humankind, not
only for Negroes.
After the labeling, and sometimes with it, comes the
grouping, the lumping together of reviews of books by
Negro authors. . . .
Negro writers are nearly always compared to one another,
rather than to white writers. This, like labeling and
grouping, tends to limit severely the expansion of the
talents of Negro writers and confine them to a literary
ghetto from which only one Negro name at a time may
emerge. . . .
Editors, too, have been guilty of labeling, comparing,
and grouping. "Negro stuff is selling well!" I heard an
editor say.
. . . --labeling, grouping, and comparing--provide the
biggest block to the expansion by Negro writers of themes
and techniques. . . .
The relationship between mixed couples is always more
graciously accepted by the reviewers when related by a
white author than by a negro.°
LeRoi Jones, Negro poet and playwright, condemns the
mediocrity of Negro literature and places the blame for its
lack of quality upon the failure of the Negro writer to "tap
his legitimate cultural tradition."^
Most of the Negro authors
have been members of the Negro middle class who have imitated
the white middle class.
In addition, he says:
The Negro, as a writer, has always been a social object,
whether glorifying the concept of white superiority, or
crying out against it. He has never moved into the
position where he could propose his own symbols, erect
his own personal myths, as any great literature must.
Negro writing has been "after the fact," based on known
social concepts within the structure of bourgeois idealistic projection of "their" America, and an emotional
climate that has never really existed.
10
At the present time, Negro writing is selling well and
reaching a wider market than ever before in the history of
Negro literature.
Langston Hughes discusses the economic
problems of the Negro author and observes that publishers pub­
lish books that will sell regardless of the race of the
author.
But for the Negro writer who must supplement the
income he receives from his writing, Mr. Hughes writes:
Where prejudice operates most blatantly against the
Negro author is in the areas peripheral to writing:
Hollywood, radio and television, editorial staff
positions, and lecturing. . . .
Everybody knows it is hard to make a living from
books alone. Most Negro writers have been teachers.
. . . But a white writer with only an unprofitable first
novel to his credit can usually get a fairly highsalaried job in publishing, radio, or TV without half
trying. Thus he can make enough money in a little while
to compose his next novel. Most Negro writers have to
create at night after correcting a hundred student
difficulties.9
But the most serious problem for the Negro writer is
the very fact that he is a Negro and is, therefore, subject
to the discrimination and prejudice suffered by all members
of his race.
He is under the necessity of establishing a per­
sonal identity which will enable him to cope with the reali­
ties of his own world.
As James Baldwin wrote in the dis­
cussion of his own problems as a writer,
In America, the color of my skin had stood between
myself and me; . . .
I left America because I doubted my ability to sur­
vive the fury of the color problem here. . . . I wanted
to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even,
merely a Negro writer.1-^
11
What was the most difficult was the fact that I was
forced to admit something I had always hidden from my­
self, which the American Negro has had to hide from him­
self as the price of his public progress; that I hated
and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved
black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly
because they failed to produce Rembrandt.
In effect, I
hated and feared the world. And this meant, not only
that I thus gave the world an altogether murderous power
over me, but also that in such a self-destroying limbo I
could never hope to write.12
He learned that exile in Paris was not the answer to
his problem,
. . . and it would not have been a city of refuge for
us if we had not been armed with American passports.
It turned out that the question of who I was was not
solved because I had removed myself from the social forces
which menaced me--anyway, these forces had become interior,
and I had dragged them across the ocean with me. The
question of who I was had at last become a personal ques­
tion, and the answer was to be found in me. . . . But I
still believe that the unexamined life is not worth
living: and I know that self-delusion, in the service
of no matter what small or lofty cause, is a price no
writer can afford.^
I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that
my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from any­
thing other people might do but from the hatred I carried
in my own heart.
At the outset of his writing career, James Baldwin
recognized the difficulties which lay before him as a Negro
writer.
"One of the difficulties about being a Negro writer
. . . is that the Negro problem is written about so widely. . .
In the discussion of the Negro problem, he states, "Of tradi­
tional attitudes there are only two--For or Against. . . .
He further states,
12
But it is part of the business of the writer . . . to
examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the
source. . . . Nevertheless, social affairs are not,
generally speaking, the writer’s prime concern, whether
they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that
he establish between himself and these affairs a distance
which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before
he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first
be allowed to take a long look back.
Baldwin did not want to write another protest novel.
He wrote in his essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel," ". . .
literature and sociology are not one and the same; . . . ." 19
But he recognized that if he were to be able to do more than
write about the Negro problem, he would have to examine it at
its very roots.
He wrote:
One writes out of one thing only--one’s experience.
Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from
this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can
possibly give. This is the only real concern of the
artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that
order which is art.
I have not written about being a Negro at such length
because I expect that to be my only subject, but only
because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could
hope to write about anything else.20
Baldwin was also aware that the Negro author might be
forced to be the spokesman for his race, thereby deserting
his responsibility as a writer.
As he says,
. . . the reality of man as a social being is not his
only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced
to deal with human beings solely in social terms; and
who has, moreover, as Wright had, the necessity thrust
on him of being the representative of some thirteen
million people. It is a false responsibility. . . .
The unlucky shepherd soon finds that . . . , he has lost
the wherewithal for his own nourishment: having not been
allowed--so fearful was his burden, so present his
audience!--to recreate his own experience.21
13
One of the flaws that characterizes the protest novel
is sentimentality, which in his opinion represents
. . . the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious
emotion, . . . the mark of dishonesty, the inability to
feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his
aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart;
and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and
violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.22
The dimensions of much of the protest literature
written about Negroes is impoverished because, as Baldwin
points out in his criticism of Richard Wright's Native Son,
. . . his force [of Bigger Thomas] comes not from his
significance as a social (or anti-social) unit, but
from his significance as the incarnation of a myth. . . .
What this means for the novel is that a necessary dimen­
sion has been cut away; this dimension being the rela­
tionship that Negroes bear to one another, that depth of
involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience
which creates a way of life. What the novel reflects-and at no point interprets--is the isolation of the Negro
within his own group and the resulting fury of impatient
scorn. It is this which creates its climate of anarchy
and unmotivated and unapprehended disaster; and it is
this climate, common to most Negro protest novels, which
has led us all to believe that in Negro life there exists
no tradition, no field of manners, no possibility of
ritual or intercourse, such as may, for example, sustain
the Jew even after he has left his father’s hoase. But
the fact is not that the Negro has no tradition but that
there has as yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently pro­
found and tough to make this tradition articulate. For a
tradition expresses, after all, nothing more than the
long and painful experience of a.people; it comes . . . ,
out of their struggle to survive. ^
And furthermore, he recognizes,
But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not
battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more
difficult--that is, accept it. The failure of the protest
novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being,
the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence
that it is his categorization alone which is real and
which cannot be transcended.2^
14
He expresses his goal very simply:
25
honest man and a good writer.”
"I want to be an
Mr. Baldwin, therefore, set for himself a magnificent
goal.
In spite of the many problems which beset the Negro
author, he wanted to describe the American experience accurately
and honestly without allowing the fact that he is an American
Negro to hamper his efforts.
15
CHAPTER II
THE ESSAYS
Baldwin published his first collection of essays,
Notes of a Native Son, in 1955.
Nobody Knows My Name:
It was followed by a second,
More Notes of a Native Son, in 1961,
and by a third, The Fire Next Time, in 1962.
During this
troubled period of our history, in which the colored people
of the world were pressing for independence in Africa and
integration in the United States, Baldwin was most articulate
in depicting the desire of his race to acquire equality.
F. W. Dupee says, "As a writer of polemical essays on the Negro
question James Baldwin has no e q u a l . B y
the perceptiveness
of his insights, and by his skilful use of experiential
material, the essay as a literary form has once again become
a powerful and effective weapon for shaping public opinion.
Because of the urgency of his message and because his view­
point is that of a Negro who has experienced prejudicial
indignities, and by a very personal approach, he forces his
white audience to share his viewpoint--". . . that the op­
pressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same
o
society; . . ."
Therefore,
Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from
our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own .
identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.
16
The essays, then, not only inform us as to what it means to
be a Negro in white America, but they also force white Ameri­
cans to take a new look at themselves.
In addition, Baldwin
paints a very revealing portrait of himself.
He is honest
enough to realize that he, too, needs to examine his own
attitudes.
He writes, "I . . . believe that the unexamined
life is not worth living . . .
(borrowed from Socrates'
speech in The Apology by Plato), and he bares his heart to
show us the bitter image of a boy growing up in the Harlem
ghetto.
Baldwin's essays can be described, in part, as narra­
tives of an exile of nearly ten years, during which he was able
to "take a long look back,""’ so that he could "look forward
in any meaningful sense."
g
In Europe, he was free to assess
his own experience and free to explore a strange new world.
He made the significant discovery that he could not evade his
origins and that he really was an American.
And he found that
freedom in Europe had brought him "back to himself, with the
responsibility for his development where it always was:
in
his own h a n d s . O n c e he had gained this knowledge, he was
able to liberate himself from the attitudes which had so warped
his mind in the past, and once he was reconciled "to being a
g
'nigger,'" he was to enter a period of creativity which re­
sulted in the writing of a large portion of his work.
Many of the essays are autobiographical, dealing with
Baldwin's need to discover his own identity.
"Notes of a
17
Native Son,” "Stranger in the Village," and the long intro­
ductory section of "Down at the Cross" offer the most reveal­
ing view of his inner confusion.
Herein are related his un­
happy quarrel with his father and with his father's religion,
his first experience with Jim Crow in New Jersey, and his
realization, in a little Swiss village, that very few people,
anywhere, recognize the Negro as a human being.
He describes
his attainment of self-knowledge in these words:
. . . the crucial time in my own development came when
I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard
of the West; . . . At the same time I had no other heri­
tage which I could possibly hope to use--. . . I would
have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have
to make them mine--I would have to accept my special
attitude, my special place in this scheme--otherwise I
would have no place in any scheme. What was the most
difficult was always hidden from myself, which the Ameri­
can Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of
his public progress; that I hated and feared white
people; this did not mean that I loved black people; on
the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they
failed to produce Rembrandt.
In effect, I hated and
feared the world. And this meant, not only that I thus
gave the world an altogether murderous power over me,
but also that in such a self-destroying limbo I could
never hope to write.
He came to accept his father's legacy, "Nothing is ever
e s c a p e d , b u t nevertheless, ". . . one must never, in one's
own life accept these injustices as commonplace, but must
fight them with all one's strength, . . ." ^
And that his
personal battle was "to keep my own heart free of hatred and
despair."
12
However, he writes, "Just the same, there are days
"I O
when I cannot pause and smile . . . ”
"And this is despite
18
everything I may do to feel differently. . ."
lii
Years before,
at an early age, young Baldwin had made this resolution:
I was icily determined--more determined, really, than I
then knew--never to make my peace with the ghetto but
to die and go to Hell before I would let any white man
spit on me. before I would accept my "place" in this
republic.
Baldwin’s journey to manhood covered a great distance, in1f)
eluding the acceptance of religion as a "gimmick"
and later
the rejection of it because it was a " r a c k e t , b e f o r e he
was able to write, " . . .
I proved, to my astonishment, to be
18
as American as any Texas G.I.”
and, "I love America more
19
than any other country in the world. . ."
It is precisely because of Baldwin’s desperate need
to resolve his inner conflicts that he is able to write so
honestly and so convincingly about what it feels like to be a
Negro.
In the title essay of the first collection, "Notes of
a Native Son," one sees only too clearly the bitterness,
despair, and self-hatred that separate not only the members
within the family, but also separate the members within the
race, and set them against each other.
One views with pity
the longings of the Negro to escape the conditions to which
his blackness condemns him.
One realizes that it is well-
nigh impossible for Mr. Baldwin with his intelligence and his
keen perceptiveness not to voice the protest and hatred that
every Negro feels in his heart for a condition imposed upon
him by the mere accident of birth.
He lives within a black
cage in a land where the only acceptable face is white and
19
the hair straight, and "wherein he has surrendered his birthright as a man no less than his birthright as a black man."
20
And speaking for all American Negroes, Baldwin says,
. . . no black man can ever hope to be entirely liberated
from this internal warfare--rage, dissembling, and con­
tempt having inevitably accompanied his fii'st realization
of the power of white men.21
And furthermore, he writes,
And there is, I should think, no Negro living in America
who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, with ang­
uish sharp or dull, in varying degrees and to varying
effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has
not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a
day, to violate, out of motives of the crudest vengeance,
their women, to break the bodies of all white people and
bring them low, as low as that dust into which he himself
has been and is being trampled; no Negro, finally, who
has not had to make his precarious adjustment to the
22
"nigger" who surrounds him and to the "nigger" in himself.
The essays, then, not only tell us what it means to be
a Negro in white America, but they force white Americans to
face the fact that they have failed to fulfill the responsi­
bilities of citizenship:
to enforce the Constitution of the
United States, which guarantees the right of every citizen to
participate in the privileges and responsibilities of a repub­
lican form of government.
But American whites evade the prob­
lems of the Negro minority by dealing with the Negro as an
abstraction.
Baldwin reminds us that
As long as we can deal with the Negro as a kind of statis­
tic, as something to be manipulated, something to be fled
from, or something to be given something . . . we can
avoid . . . what he really, really means to us.
Or, another type of evasion is very evident when,
20
. . . those white people who are in favor of integration,
prove to be in favor of it later, in some other city,
24
some other town, some other building, some other school.
Baldwin condemns the American whites for their refusal
to face reality.
He says that the United States is a nation
that
. . . has spent a large part of its time and energy
looking away from one of the principal facts of its life.
This failure to look reality in the face diminishes a
nation as it diminishes a person, and it can only be
described as unmanly.25
Baldwin grimly says that the only reality is Death and that
Americans do not believe in death.
For this reason, therefore,
"The white man's unadmitted--and apparently, to him, unspeakable--private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro."
Baldwin declares that while the Negro knows that "We (Americans
in general, that is) like to point to Negroes and to most of
27
their activities with a kind of tolerant scorn . . . ,"
the
truth is,
We do not know what to do with him in life; if he
breaks our sociological and sentimental image of him we
are panic-stricken and we feel ourselves betrayed. When
he violates this image, therefore, he stands in the
greatest danger (sensing which, we uneasily suspect that
he is very often playing a part for our benefit); . . . 8
And the truth of this statement explains why the Negro cannot
have a true identity.
Baldwin asserts that
It is part of the price the Negro pays for his position
in this society that, . . . , he is almost always acting.
A Negro learns to gauge precisely what reaction the alien
person facing him desires, and he produces it with dis­
arming artlcssness. y
26
21
Baldwin himself admits this necessity, for he says, "I have
spent most of my life, after all, watching white people and
.
.
30
outwitting them, so that I might survive."
Thus the white
world has denied and prevented the Negro from establishing a
true identity, and this is the question in the essays for
which Baldwin seeks an answer:
How can a man with a black
skin throw off the false image which white Americans have
imposed upon him?
How can he reveal his true individuality
as a man?
The true worth of Baldwin’s essays is that he has made
a significant contribution to the thought of our time by
spelling out the rejection, by the Negro, of all the myths
which white Americans have attempted to impose upon him:
religious, moral, political, and social.
In the first place,
The American Negro has the great advantage of having
never believed that collection of myths about themselves
to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors
were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in
the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that
Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace,
that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans
and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that
American men are the world’s most direct and virile,
that American women are pure.^i
At first the Negro accepted the tenets of the Christian
theology, the theology that as a son of Ham, he was damned in
the sight of both God and man.
"Black is the color of evil;
32
only the robes of the saved arc white."
But Baldwin points
out
22
It is axiomatic that the Negro is religious, which is
to say that he stands in fear of the God our ancestors
gave us and before whom we all tremble yet. There are
probably more churches in Harlem than in any other ghetto
in this city and they are going full blast every night
and some of them arc filled with praying people every
day. This, supposedly, exemplifies the Negro’s essential
simplicity and good-will; but it is actually a fairly
desperate emotional business.33
And what whites fail to recognize is that the Negro's identi­
fication of himself with the oppressed Jews of the Old Testa­
ment is a double-edged weapon and, in actuality, "Religion
operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge:
. . . the bad [white people]) will be punished and the good
r
»i
[black pcoplej rewarded. . ."
3 ^4
Those Negroes who have
turned to the Black Muslim movement now declare that God is
black.
And, in his personal rejection of the Christian
religion, Baldwin says that if the white God cannot make us
"larger, freer, and more loving, . . .
it is time we got rid
of Him."35
The moral record of the white man’s conduct has been
equally disillusioning.
Baldwin maintains,
Negroes know how little most white people are prepared
to implement their words with deeds, how little, when
the chips are down, they are prepared to risk. And
this long history of moral evasion has had an unhealthy
effect on the total life of the country, and has eroded
whatever respect Negroes may once have felt for white
people.
It is self-evident to the Negro that,
In any case, white people, who had robbed black people
of their liberty and who profited by this theft every
hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to
stand.
23
And Baldwin asks,
How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a
people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way
they say they do, or the way they say they should?38
Politically the Negro has never been really free.
Every ghetto contains its police force which, to the Negro,
represents the "force of the white world, and that world's
real intentions are, simply, for that world's criminal profit
and ease, to keep the black man corraled up here, in his
39
place."
In the places where the Negro is allowed to vote,
"the Negro vote is of sufficient value to force politicians
to bargain for it." ^
And, "Of all Americans, Negroes dis­
trust politicians most, . . . , they are always aware of the
enormous gap between election promises and their daily lives."
41
Segregation in the ghetto, in the schools, in the churches,
in the buses, and in the restaurants are but a few of the
proofs that the vast majority of Negroes are not equal citi­
zens.
But today, as Baldwin announces, "The American Negro
can no longer, nor will he ever again, be controlled by white
America's image of him."
He refuses to be treated as a
second-class citizen.
Socially the Negro's status is low:
tells us where the bottom is . . ."
43
". . . the Negro
In the white man's
world, in spite of the fact that "Today, to be sure, we know
44
that the Negro is not biologically or mentally inferior . . . ”
"He may not marry our daughters or our sisters, nor may he
. . . eat at our tables or live in our houses."
45
It is m
24
limited areas only that he is able to receive recognition.
"We . . . drive Negroes mad . . .
by accepting them in ball
parks, and on concert stages, but not in our homes and not
in our neighborhoods, and not in our churches."
Within his own group the Negro is limited also in the
achievement of status.
If he becomes one of the better class
of Negroes, his position is precarious, for those Negroes
who remain on the lower rungs of the social ladder distrust
him and accuse him of trying to be like white men.
As Baldwin
remarks,
One Negro meeting another at an all-white cocktail
party, . . . , cannot but wonder how the other got
there. The aucstion is: Is he for real? or is he
kissing ass?**'
And the reason for the lack of homogeneity among Negroes,
Baldwin says, is that
Negroes know about each other what can here be called
family secrets, and this means that one Negro, if he
wishes, can "knock" the other's "hustle"--can give his
game away.
It is still not possible to overstate the
price a Negro pays to climb out of obscurity--for it
is a particular price, involved with being a Negro; . . .
The higher he rises, the less is his journey worth,
since . . . all he can possibly find himself exposed
to is the grim emptiness of the white world . . . and
the even more ghastly emptiness of black people who wish
they were white. Therefore, one "exceptional" Negro
watches another "exceptional" Negro in order to find out
if he knows how vastly successful and bitterly funny the
hoax has been. °
Therefore, in Baldwin's opinion, the Negro's lack of social
status is retarded by both blacks and whites.
of the blame rests on whites.
However, most
25
. . . his history and his progress, his relationship to
all other Americans, has been kept in the social arena.
He is a social and not a personal or a human problem;
to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes,
injustices, remote violence, . . . . y
On the other hand, Baldwin concedes that Negroes are
not entirely blameless.
He recognizes that the Negro leader
who is truly interested in helping the Negro soon realizes he
is helpless, but "one cannot help observing that some Negro
leaders and politicians are far more concerned with their
careers than with the welfare of Negroes . . . ." ^
The
Negroes who attain a degree of financial success isolate them­
selves from the poorer Negroes and "Negroes . . . who d_o own
anything are more interested in their profits than in their
fellows.
In essence, then, Baldwin holds to a deterministic
view, for he arraigns and judges the white man alone as being
responsible lor the black man’s suffering, degradation, and
lack of identity.
Americans are guilty of the deadly sin of
turning away from reality and are guilty of being inhuman in
their unsympathetic attitude toward the plight of the Negro.
Baldwin’s remarks are, of course, directed mainly to
the white liberal audience.
While he speaks with utmost con­
tempt of liberals, both white and black, and he sarcastically
derides the gullibility of Americans and the "sloppy and
52
fatuous nature of American good will,"
he does so without
fear of reprisal because he is aware that certain Americans
26
listen to him with pleasure.
His castigations, name-calling,
and denunciations furnish these individuals with a catharsis
which relieves them of their submerged guilt feelings.
How­
ever, in his later essays, he loses control of his material
and his audience.
Baldwin once made this statement:
"Rage
•
• can only be dissembled,"
.
53 and "Rage can
cannot be hidden,
it
only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under
the domination of the intelligence."^
Before he became in­
volved with the civil rights movement, the early essays reflect
the views of the controlled observer.
After he became the
spokesman, the tone of his prose becomes filled with rage and
vehemence.
One hears the voice of the exhorter, the preacher.
What were warnings in the early essays--"All ideas are dangerous--dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where
55
the action leads no man can say," --become threats and
prophecies of destruction in The Fire Next Time.
He declares
that "the only thing white peoDle have that black people need,
cr
or should want, is power."
In noting Baldwin's achievement as a writer of essays,
one must grant that he has used the form effectively to describe
the racial problem in America.
He voices truths about whites
and blacks which both must accept, however reluctant they are
to hear them.
His analysis of the racial problem is illumin­
ating because he has probed the very roots of our national
dilemma.
His language is sophisticated, compelling, and at
27
times, violent.
Its power can be attributed to its tone of
unrelenting anguish, protest, and denunciation.
In fact, his
rhetoric is so eloquent that one hardly sees, upon a first
reading, the flaws that weaken the cogency of his message.
The first disturbing element is a curious ambivalence
in his attitudes.
In his early essays when he described his
own experience of what it feels like to be a Negro, the ambiva­
lence revealed in his attitudes convinced the reader of his
honesty.
But after he becomes involved as a spokesman for his
race, ambivalence lessens the effectiveness of his message.
Marcus Klein comments,
Baldwin, . . . , must find the assumption of spokesman
distressing because he is not committed to it, because
his vision is personal. His subject is himself. And it
is the evidence of his best work in fiction and essays,
that a spokesman is just what he does not want to be.
Something like this reluctance must be behind the final
equivocation of his essays that should be polemical, the
strange use of a first-person plural that dissociates
from Negroes, the final failure to give his indignation
the form and force of argument. 7
Dachinc Rainer also notes his dissociation from his race.
In
discussing the essay, "Many Thousands Gone," she says, "He
repudiates his blackness to so an alarming extent that the
•
•
•
CQ
piece reads like a literary exercise in schizophrenia."
In
that essay, Baldwin wrote
Time has made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing
has succeeded in making it exactly like our own. . .59
In a later essay, he makes a more direct statement, "I wanted
to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or, even,
merely a Negro writer."^®
28
Baldwin occupies the unhappy position wherein he is
torn between his loyalties.
remain loyal to his race.
does not wish to alienate.
His racial ties demand that he
He has many white friends whom he
An incident pertinent to this
difficulty took place during his visit with Elijah Muhammed,
head of the Black Muslim movement, and is related in the fol­
lowing part of their conversation:
. . . I told Elijah that I did not care if white and
black people married, and that I had many white friends.
I would have no choice, if it came to it, but to perish
with them, for (I said to myself, but not to Elijah), I
love a few people and they love me and some of them are
white, and isn't love more important than color?61
And when Elijah tries to force him to make a commitment, by
asking, "And what are you now?", Baldwin evasively answers,
"Nothing.
I'm a writer.
I like doing things a l o n e . W h a t
can be taken as further evidence of his dissociation from other
Negro movements is the fact that while he docs not ally himself
with the Muslims, neither docs he call upon prominent Negro
leaders of the non-violent movement, such as Martin Luther King.
The essays arc marred further by Baldwin's evasion of
the expectations he arouses in his readers.
He protests,
accuses, and presents problems, but he offers no feasible
solutions to the questions he raises.
For example, he makes
such statements as these:
I think that what we really have to do is to create a
country in which there are no minorities . . . J
If you know whence you came, there is really no limit
to where you can g o . ()Li
29
. . . freedom is not something that anybody can be given;
freedom is something people take and people arc as free
as they want to be (italics mine).65
If we--and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and
the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers,
insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—
do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful
that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our
country, and change the history of the world.66
In order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in
the world, America and all the Western nations will be
forced to re-examine 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.67
As F. W. Dupee points out, the proposal in the preceding
statement has little chance of being accomplished.
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.68
And it goes without saying, that whites will never
accept such a solution as this:
The only way he [the white manj can be released from the
Negro's tyrannical power over him is to consent, in
effect, to become black himself. . . . ”
At other times one finds Baldwin contradicting himself,
sometimes within a single essay, as in "Down at the Cross."
At one point he says,
I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve
their freedom here in the United States. But I am also
concerned for their dignity, for the health of their
souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make
to do to others what has been done to them.^O
30
But when he voices an opinion such as the following, he encour­
ages the very violence which he says he opposes:
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.71
And while the following statement is limited by the fact that
Baldwin is not in sympathy with the principles of the Muslims,
yet the implication seems to be that he shares and, to a
limited extent, approves of their tactics.
And if I were a Muslim, I would not hesitate to utilize-or, indeed, to exacerbate--the social and spiritual dis­
content that reigns here, for, at the very worst, I would
merely have contributed to the destruction of a house I
hated, and it would not matter if I perished, too.'^
He even seems to advocate the principle of separatism in these
words:
. . . how is the American Negro now to form himself into
a separate nation? For this--and not only from the Muslim
point of view (italics mine)--would seem to be his only
hope ol- not perishing in the American backwater. . . .'3
Such remarks can only aggravate the troubled situation that
now exists among blacks and whites and confuse the reader as
to Baldwin's true stand on these matters.
Generalizations unsupported by facts or evidence of
their validity prove to be another major weakness of Baldwin's
writing.
Nick Aaron Ford points to a few examples in these
comment s :
Despite the logic and truth of most of Baldwin's philosophi­
cal comments on the life, thought, actions, arts, and
writers of our time, he is occasionally guilty of an un­
forgivable gullibility which leads to some errors in his
31
judgment. For instance, in the chapter on :,A Fly in the
Buttermilk," he is convinced that segregated schools are
greatly inferior to integrated schools for some of the
wrong reasons. He accepts as fact the idea that the
segregated school is inferior because the Negro teachers
do not care whether their students learn or not. He
accepts as genuine a Negro mother and her son's charac­
terization of the average faculty member of a segregated
high school as not caring whether or not the pupils
learn. "Well, the teacher comes in, and she gives you
something to read and she goes out. She leaves some
other student in charge. . . .
At the end of the period
she comes back and tells you something to read for the
next day." As a college teacher for thirty years my
experience with students from hundreds of segregated high
schools from every section of the country is convincing
proof that such an attitude is not typical of the average
Negro faculty member. If this charge were true, who could
honestly advocate the employment of Negro teachers by an
integrated school
Baldwin himself offers this explanation as to the reason the
Negro teachers do not care whether a pupil learns anything or
not:
How could they care? There were too many children, from
shaky homes and worn-out parents, in aging, inadequate
plants.^ 5
Mr. Ford succinctly questions the logic of Baldwin's reasoning,
If this is a logical reason for a teacher's not caring,
why would teachers in integrated schools act any differ­
ently when confronted with these same children?'^
Another matter which contributes to the confusion of
the reader is the conflicting statements which Mr. Baldwin
utters with regard to the sexuality of the Negro.
He decries
the fact that
It is still true, alas, that to be an American Negro male
is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol: which
means that one pays, . . . , for the sexual insecurity of
others.77
32
A statement in another essay is similar:
. . . there is probably no greater (or misleading) body
of sexual myths in the world today than those which pro­
liferated around the figure of the American Negro.78
Yet Mr. Baldwin not only accepts the myth but by implications
and several direct statements contributes to the perpetuation
of that myth.
He acknowledges the sexuality of the Negro in
such statements as these:
. . . when he [the American Negro] faces an African, he
is facing the unspeakable dark, guilty, erotic past which
the Protestant fathers made him bury . . . but which lives
in his personality and haunts the universe yet.'9
What passions cannot be unleashed on a dark road in a
Southern night!
Everything seems so sensual, so languid,
and so private. Desire can be acted out here; over this
fence, behind that tree, in the darkness, there; and no
one will see, no one will ever know. Only the night is
watching and the night was made for desire.
Protestantism
is the wrong religion for people in such climates; America
is perhaps the last nation in which such a climate belongs.
In the Southern night everything seems possible, the most
private, unspeakable longings; . . .80
By deriding the anti-sexuality of white men, he implies the
greater degree of sexual potency to be found in the Negro male.
He says that America is "an Anglo-Teutonic, antisexual country."
And, that in the United States, he finds " . . .
a civilization
sexually so pathetic that the white man's masculinity depends
on a denial of the masculinity of the blacks."82
Baldwin's collaboration in the perpetuation of myths
about the Negro extends also to the Negro's music.
White Ameri­
cans cannot ever understand the Negro's blues and his jazz:
81
33
Americans are able to admire [Negro music] because a
protective sentimentality limits their understanding
of it.83
In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is some­
thing tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged.
White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy
and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly
the way most white Americans sing them--sounding, in both
cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare
not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from
which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only
people who have been "down the line." as the song puts
it, know what this music is about.8^
Most of the flaws I have discussed occur in the later
essays and are indicative of changes that have taken place in
Baldwin himself.
One feels that Baldwin in the early essays
was young and idealistic, writing honestly about the racial
problem as it seemed to him.
In the later essays, the role
of spokesman seems to have seduced him in such a way that
while he is voicing truths, they are not voiced honestly.
It
is easy for the spokesman to begin to believe that his author­
ity and opinions are infallible.
He is being dishonest when
he imputes the motives of a few to the whole race.
He is being
evasive when he fails to offer reasonable solutions to the
problems he discusses.
In the role of spokesman, he is not
able to maintain "the distance between himself and social af­
fairs which will allow, . . ., for clarity."85
He reveals a
hypersensitivity which rejects all that the white man can do
for the Negro.
On the one hand, he demands and insists that
the white man must make all the changes.
On the other, every
34
friendly gesture by the white man smacks of patronage and
tokenism.
Baldwin is concerned repeatedly with the failure of
the whites to face reality.
It would appear that he also
fails to recognize some realities.
In rejecting American
ideals because Americans do not live up to those ideals, he
fails to recognize that failure to reach those ideals does
not invalidate the ideals themselves.
The more the Negro
affronts the common values of the middle class in this country,
the less willing the whites are to accept the Negro as an
equal.
But there are no easy answers to the present dilemma,
and it will require the efforts of both blacks and whites to
reach an equitable solution.
Despite the flaws in some of the essays, Baldwin is an
accomplished essayist.
In his best essays--MEverybody's
Protest Novel," "Many Thousands Gone," "Notes of a Native Son,"
"Fifth Avenue, Uptown," and "Nobody Knows My Name"--he defines
the Negro problem and articulates the racial dilemma now
facing the American public.
Some of these essays appear in
recent anthologies for secondary and college students.
In
the future, the historian and the sociologist will find these
essays to be a valuable source of information on the social
climate of the fifties and sixties.
35
CHAPTER III
SELECTED SHORT STORIES
It is but natural that Baldwin should turn to fiction
in an attempt to reach a wider audience, and to gain the pres­
tige which is accorded to the writer of fiction as compared
with the essayist.
Baldwin’s greatest desire, as he says many
times in his essays, is to become a good writer.
He wants to
write artistically out of his own experience, and he wants
to avoid the pitfalls of sociology and protest which properly
belong in essays and not in fiction.
In this chapter, I shall
examine five representative short stories written during the
period from 1948 to 1960.
Other short stories which were pub­
lished during this period are excerpts from the novels on
which he was also engaged during this time.
In the examina­
tion of these stories, I will trace the parallels which exist
between the essays and the stories, and I will point out
Baldwin's development as a writer and the extent to which he
achieves his artistic goals.
In his first collection of essays, Notes of a Native
Son, Baldwin says:
One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience.
Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from
this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can
possibly give. This is the only real concern of the ar­
tist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order
which is art.
36
Has Baldwin been able to meet his goal in these short
stories?
Baldwin’s career as a writer of fiction began with
the publication of his first short story, "Previous Condition,"
in the October, 1948, issue of Commentary.
this story as " . . .
The editors hailed
a sensitive and powerful study of the
life of a young Negro artist in present-day American society.
It heralds, we think, an important new talent on the literary
2
scene."
The story is an impressionistic sketch which attempts,
in the words of Peter, the first-person narrator, to "explain
what it feels like to be black."
Peter is forced to vacate a
room rented for him by his Jewish friend, Jules, because the
white landlady "can't have no colored people here.
tenants are complainin'.
All my
Women afraid to come home nights . . .
Why don't you go on uptown like you belong?"
The story, then,
is a vehicle for the discussion of the Negro's inability to
find a place in American society.
The structure of the story is episodic, consisting of
Peter's confrontations with four ethnic groups:
first, with
his landlady (white America); second, with Jules Weissmann (the
American-Jewish minority group); third, with Ida (the shantyIrish); and, fourth, with two Negro women in a Harlem bar (the
minority group on the bottom of American society).
In the first confrontation, Peter is evicted from a
room, for which the rent has been paid.
Peter has no choice.
The policeman is there to obey the command of the landlady,
37
not
to protect the rights of Peter.
for the unused portion of the rent.
He receives no refund
His only way to revenge
himself for this injustice is to insult the landlady, which
he does by saying to her, ’’You wanna come in and watch me
dress?"
help.
After his eviction, Peter turns again to Jules for
But he finds that he can get little help from his Jewish
friend.
Besides sympathy (mere words), Jules offers to let
him
sleep on the floor of his room.
two
persecuted minorities does not prove to be a very strong
bond.
Common suffering between
As Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son, ". . . the
Jew feels he must climb higher on the American social ladder
and has, so far as he is concerned, nothing to gain from
identification with any minority even more unloved than
he. . . . "
3
Jules, because he is white, does have a decent
place in which to live, and he does have a job.
In the third episode, Peter meets Ida, a descendant of
the shanty-Irish from Boston.
Because she too is white and is
a beautiful woman, she has been able to marry a wealthy man
and thus has achieved her place of security in society.
is willing to do more for Peter than Jules.
She
She feeds him,
helps him whenever he gets stranded, and takes him to concerts,
nightclubs, or the movies— only to places of entertainment,
a
not to her home.
She has no love for her husband, and for
her, Peter is a source of diversion.
What she will do for
Peter is limited to less than complete acceptance of him as
her equal.
Peter remarks, "We never let it get too serious."
38
The one thing which seems to link them is their mutual re­
fusal to believe in democracy in America, displayed several
times in the story by remarks such as, "God save the American
republic," in bitter, derisive tones.
Ida mouths the usual platitudes:
"We're all in this
together . . . it's no better anywhere else. . . . Nothing's
going to change . . .
, it's always been like that."
In
bitter rejection of mere words, Peter creates a scene in the
restaurant to embarrass Ida.
Though she forgives him, Peter
rejects her company and walks off alone.
In the fourth encounter, Peter seeks refuge among his
own people in Harlem, only to find that he doesn't belong
there either.
When he rebuffs the friendly overtures of the
older Negro woman, she says, "Nigger, you must think you's
somebody."
Peter does not want to accept the fact that he is
a Negro; the links of color and sexual attraction cannot pre­
vent alienation from a race.
The subject matter is part of Baldwin's experience,
but he has presented a sociological study of minority relation­
ships in America, and not an artistic rendering of that exper­
ience.
The characters in the story are unrealized, serving
only to voice Baldwin's statements made in the essays.
The
flashback which describes Peter's previous life is insufficient
to explain his present character:
the period of six years
after he runs away from home is summarized in a statement that
he is now an actor, has knocked around, and has done a lot of
39
traveling.
It is not credible to accept his present ability
to use standard English and his love for the music of Beethoven
as the product of knocking around.
There is no evidence to
show that he has never enjoyed some successes in life.
other characters are also unreal.
The
They too serve to present
attitudes and ideas expressed in the essays, and they are an
audience for Peter when he speaks.
Baldwin attempts to introduce some symbolism by the
description of the room from which Peter is evicted.
It is
meant to represent the place which the Negro occupies in modern
America.
It is a room "to sleep in," "to die in," but not a
room to "live in."
Nothing comes into the room except dust
to stifle the life of the occupant.
The room is square, which
means that the dimensions are rigid, and therefore, the occu­
pant cannot move any further in one direction than he can in
another.
The walls are the color of chipped dried blood,
symbolic of violence and death.
The glass of the mirror above
the fireplace is a cloudy gray color; thus it reflects only
colorless images and blurred outlines.
Because Peter cannot
see himself clearly in it, he has no true identity.
The fire­
place, the symbol of love and companionship in the home and
among friends, is out of order.
Peter finds neither love nor
companionship extended to him in white America.
The fantastic
array of light fixtures allows the Negro to see clearly the
conditions of his existence in America.
As a fictional device,
the symbolism ought to have an evocative appeal to the reader's
40
imagination.
But the one-to-one correspondence between the
room and the social conditions of Negro life and history is
too obvious to be evocative.
Baldwin uses other devices to secure the empathy of
the reader.
end.
The first-person narrator is useful toward this
Peter is reliable, and we can believe him when he describes
his feelings in sensory imagery, such as:
his body is clammy
cold with sweat; his blood bubbles like fire and wine; his
heart beats so hard, that it tears his chest apart; his voice
rasps and rattles in his throat; his skin prickles, tiny hot
needles puncture his flesh; he wants to kill the landlady,
take a club, a hatchet, and bring it down with all his weight,
splitting her skull down the middle where she parts her irongray hair; he feels he is drowning; his stomach feels like
water; he shakes like a baby (is there a particular shake of
a baby?).
This imagery is Baldwin's way of externalizing the
Negro’s fears and it tends to invoke the reader's sensations,
too.
Two years later, Baldwin's second short story, "The
Death of the Prophet," was published in the March, 1950, issue
of Commentary.
This time the editors were content to say,
"James Baldwin has been called the most promising young Negro
writer since Richard Wright""* (italics mine).
This story is told in the form of a journey.
John
Grimes, guilt-ridden and alienated from his father, Gabriel
Grimes, makes a trip to the hospital to visit his sick father.
41
He arrives just in time to see him die, and shortly takes the
walk back to the railroad station to resume ordinary life.
On the symbolical level, the journey takes John from ignorance
to knowledge.
The face-to-face confrontation with death for
the first time forces John to see one of the realities of
life.
John learns that time and death are irrevocable and
that henceforth he must face his loneliness alone.
The story is autobiographical except for minor details.
Baldwin vividly recounts the story of his father’s death in
his essay, "Notes of a Native Son."^
John and Gabriel Grimes,
the two main characters, are extensions of the same characters
found in his first novel, Go Tel1 It On The Mountain.
The
story, written in the third person, but viewed through John’s
consciousness, shows that Baldwin has acquired greater skill
in the use of narrative devices than was apparent in his first
story, "Previous Condition."
His handling of the flashback
technique to develop the situation and the characterization of
John shows great improvement over his previous use.
Baldwin
uses language that is biblical in nature to enrich the theme,
give depth to the characterizations, and to heighten the dig­
nified rhythm and tone which such a subject requires.
However, the story is marred by several flaws.
Baldwin
intrudes to make generalities which are irrelevant, such as,
"The joys of hell arc as difficult to discover as the joys of
heaven and are even more over-rated."
Without producing
42
evidence to account for John’s fears, John thinks that the
doctor and the nurse in the hospital are secretly conspiring
to destroy him.
Also, Baldwin is not consistent in maintain­
ing the narration of the story through John's consciousness.
In this scene, the statement is incredible:
"Have a seat,"
the doctor said; very kindly, so that Johnnie knew that the
doctor was uncomfortable" (italics mine).
At another point,
Baldwin intrudes to explain what is obvious to the reader:
"He
JjohnnieJ moved slowly behind the doctor.
At the edge of
the screen the doctor stopped; he looked at the doctor, won­
dering what was wrong, and realized that the doctor was being
tactful.
He did not feel that he should be present at the
last meeting of a son and his father" (italics mine).
Inasmuch
as the story is being told through John's consciousness, he
could hardly know what the doctor felt.
Another element deflects the reader from the major
theme.
It is the introduction of Freudian implications in the
story.
John comes to the hospital unwillingly, bearing in his
heart an implacable hatred against his father, and the loss of
a father is not the uppermost thought in John’s mind.
"It was
his father that he watched dying; and no more would this vio­
lent man possess him; this arm would never be raised again."
Also, he thinks, "Now he was the man, the conqueror, alone on
the tilting earth."
The implication is that John exults over
the defeat of an enemy.
He has succeeded in castrating the
43
father-figure.
And the fainting spell which follows his
father’s death becomes significant, therefore, because it sug­
gests to the reader--but not to the author--that John is not
the man, the conqueror, but a creature of panic and confusion.
His identity, which was based upon his determination not to be
possessed by his father, no longer exists.
John's fainting
symbolizes his own destruction because he accepts man's posi­
tion in the world as a condition devoid of free will.
He
leaves the hospital, defeated and hopeless, a victim of a cruel
God.
The weakness of the story lies in the fact that Baldwin
has not explored man's confrontation with death but has con­
fused issues by the introduction of irrelevant experience, and
he reaches no resolution which shows that John is more mature
from this experience.
Baldwin's treatment of his experience
lapses into sentimentality; the theme is reduced to a plea for
Baldwin's personal situation as a Negro.
Death is one of the
realities of life, and how John proposes to face life follow­
ing this encounter is not suggested.
Seven years later, "Sonny's Blues," Baldwin's third
published short story appeared in the Summer 1957 issue of
Partisan Review, was reprinted in Martha Foley and David
Burnett's The Best American Short Stories, 1958, and subse­
quently was included by Herbert Gold in his anthology, Fiction
of the Fifties, in 1959.
44
In the opening paragraph of the essay, "Many Thousands
Gone," Baldwin makes this statement:
"It is only in his music,
which Americans are able to admire because a protective senti­
mentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in
America has been able to tell his s t o r y . T h e essay does not
go on to develop this theme, but in "Sonny’s Blues" Baldwin’s
intention seems to be to use the blues, the one form of Ameri­
can music which is truly indigenous to the American-Negro
culture, to solve Sonny’s problem.
The major conflict in the story occurs between the
bourgeois, white values of the middle-class Negro, adopted by
Sonny’s brother and his other relatives, and the values derived
from the Negro culture and tradition, which Sonny must accept
if he wishes to achieve a true identity and not become an
imitation of a white man.
Sonny is caught in this dilemma.
The narrator says that Sonny’s individuality lies in his quiet­
ness, his privacy, his sensitivity, and his desire to become
a jazz musician.
He drops out of school and joins the Navy to
escape from Harlem.
Although no account is given of his exper­
ience in the white world, his rejection of it is to be assumed
by his return to Harlem, where he leads a bohemian life in the
Village which is ended by his arrest for dope-addiction.
After his release from the treatment center of the
prison, Sonny says that all he wants in life is to escape
suffering.
But he seems to contradict himself in answer to
45
his brother's remark that suffering is inescapable, by saying,
"No, there's no way not to suffer.
But you try all kinds of
ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and
to make it seem--well, like you."
If the reader can believe
this statement, then Sonny has accepted suffering and intends
to make suffering a part of his life.
to explain the meaning of the blues.
This scene is contrived
Suffering, the acceptance
of it as a fact and the incorporation of it within one's being,
is the meaning behind the blues.
sing the blues.
One can face life if one can
As Marcus Klein points out, the use of the
blues in this story becomes a mere gimmick.
The blues are
defined, but they are not a causal force which brings about
the resolution of Sonny's problem.
The narrator and Sonny
are reconciled, but Sonny has only found what has always
g
existed within the range of his possibilities.
To the reader,
what seems incredible is the length of time consumed before
Sonny could understand the blues, especially in view of his
consuming interest in jazz music and his almost idolatrous
worship of Charlie Parker.
And what is more ironic is the im­
plication behind Baldwin's statement that it is the white man
who cannot understand the blues; apparently there are Negroes
who do not understand the blues either.
Sonny's older brother, a successful schoolteacher, is
the first-person narrator of the story.
The only mark which
distinguishes him and his family from the white middle-class
46
is color:
he gained his education under the G.I. Bill (we are
not told why Sonny did not avail himself of this); his wife
comes from a middle-class Negro family; there are two boys in
the family- and they live in a housing development.
The
characterization of the narrator is particularly successful
in this story:
his character is revealed as he tells the story
without the use of summary statements and our interest in him
results from what he unknowingly reveals about himself.
Baldwin skilfully uses the first-person narrator point
of view to develop the ironic contrast between the narrator's
self-image and the real person revealed to the reader by his
speech and actions.
He has no more real interest in his stu­
dents than the schoolteachers Baldwin describes in his essay,
.
"Fly in Buttermilk."
9
Because he has been able to move away
from Harlem, he has lost interest in the welfare of Negroes,
and his only concern is his own career.
his race extends to Sonny, also.
His dissociation from
It is with great reluctance
that he finally decides to help Sonny; his motivation to do so
seems to spring from a faint twinge of guilt over his failure
to keep his promise given his mother years before.
In all
his confrontations with various other minor characters in the
story, he emerges as a Negro who is trying to live like the
white man:
smug, indifferent to Negro problems, obtuse in
his lack of understanding Sonny's needs, ignorant of jazz and
rejecting it for classical music, rejecting all that would
47
not find approval in the white world.
In contrast to Sonny,
who knows how to suffer, the narrator is insensitive, incapable
of real suffering.
His memory of little Grade's death is a
superlative rendition of maudlin sentimentality, which
ironically, he says makes Sonny's trouble seem rea1--Baldwin's
tone suggests that the narrator's suffering over the loss of
little Gracie cannot be equated with Sonny's spiritual agony,
which drove him to dope-addiction.
The narrator's separation
from his race is recognized by Sonny, the other musicians, and
the patrons of the night club--the narrator is seated alone
at a table in a dark corner.
The narrator accepts the iso­
lation accorded him as a mark of status.
Part of the irony
of the story results from the fact that the narrator, who is
most in need of an understanding of the blues, remains un­
changed.
As suggested previously, one of Baldwin's intentions
in this story is to introduce the blues as a controlling device
in the development of a story dealing with Negro life.
he does not accomplish.
This
The jazz motifs throughout the story
serve to aid in the creation of a melancholy atmosphere in the
lives of his characters and to provide a definition of the
blues for the white reader.
But he does not use the blues to
solve a problem which is peculiarly related to the blues
tradition.
The reconciliation between the brothers could have
been accomplished more honestly in some other manner.
A
4 8
skilful use of this part of the Negro’s authentic heritage
could be invaluable to Baldwin in overcoming the stereotyped
images of the Negro musician found in this story.
Had Sonny’s
solution to his problem been truly discovered in the blues,
this would have provided an affirmation for a way of life in
which a Negro could truly achieve his own identity; the blues
would be a means for the creative expression of life's meaning.
Baldwin's progress as a writer of fiction is evident
in this story which shows technical improvement.
He uses the
flashback effectively in developing the background and situa­
tion of his characters; his use of direct dialogue inter­
spersed with scenes improves the characterizations and adds
an effect of realism; his use of more than one level of speech
in the dialogue creates rhythms and tensions which indicate
the changing attitudes of the characters who are alternately
attracted and repelled by the values represented in Sonny and
his brother.
Despite Baldwin’s improvement in writing, the reader
cannot overlook serious flaws in the story.
In the last scene
the language used by the narrator to describe Sonny's performance
with the jazz group becomes rhapsodic.
It is inconsistent for
the narrator, who has been depicted as insensitive and lacking
both the knowledge and understanding of music, to express him­
self in a style that is poetic.
Baldwin’s own love of elo­
quence betrays him and causes him to put words into the mouths
49
of his characters which are disproportionate to them.
Such
language is both affected and pretentious.
Other author intrusions occur.
When the narrator first
learns of Sonny's arrest, his thoughts are concerned with the
way in which this incident will affect his personal life.
Therefore, one may be quite sure that the following thought
was not present in his mind:
These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then,
they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped
abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possi­
bilities. They were filled with rage. All they really
knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives,
which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of
the movies which had blinded them to that other dark­
ness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at
once more together than they were at any other time,
and more alone.
Another author intrusion occurs in the description of
the housing project, where the narrator's thoughts run:
We live in a housing project. It hasn't been up
long. A few days after it was up it seemed uninhabitably new, now, of course, it's already run-down.
It
looked like a parody of the good, clean, faceless
life--God knows the people who live in it do their
best to make it a parody.
The characterization of the narrator becomes inconsistent
whenever Baldwin seems to forget, that, the narrator is sup­
posed to represent a middle-class Negro.
This habit of author
intrusion creates inconsistencies in characterization, retards
the movement of the narrative, and is irrelevant to theme and
plot movement.
The use of such statements shows that, again,
fiction is only a tool for Baldwin's didactic purposes.
50
Because Baldwin's purpose is to protest and reform,
this story is rather a case study of social conditions in
Harlem.
The characters lack life because one has not wit­
nessed the development these conditions have caused.
They
are created ready-made to illustrate Baldwin's case.
No new
insight into the human condition has been gained by the
reader.
He has been informed of conditions in Harlem.
Bald­
win demands pity for Sonny and for himself, helpless victims
of a fate which placed them in such an environment.
The publication of this story in three successive years
testifies to the timeliness of the subject matter.
For a
reading public that is less critical of art than it is of the
content of a story, Baldwin's story has made sociological
data more palatable by displaying facts through fiction.
"Come Out the Wilderness," published in Mademoiselle
in the March 1958 issue, was also reprinted in other publica­
tions.
It appeared in the September, 1961, issue of Negro
Digest and was included in 1961 in the collection Best Short
Stories From Mademoiselle.
With the publication of this story, Baldwin begins to
deal with the two subjects, love and sex, that engross him in
most of his later fiction.
This story is notable also because
in it, for the first time, Baldwin chooses a woman as protagon­
ist, and he deals with the Southern Negro character, which has
been shaped by the physical nature of the South but has been
51
distorted by the Puritan repression of the Negro's instinctual
nature.
In the title essay of Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin
says of the South:
. . . the Southern landscape--the trees, the silence, the
liquid heat, and the fact that one always seems to be
traveling great distances--seems designed for violence,
seems, almost, to demand it. What passions cannot be
unleashed on a dark road in a Southern night! Everything
seems so sensual, so languid, and so private.
Desire
can be acted out here; over this fence, behind that tree,
in the darkness, there; and no one will see, no one will
ever know. Only the night is watching and the night was
made for desire.
Protestantism is the wrong religion
for people in such climates; America is perhaps the last
nation in which such a climate belongs.
In the Southern
night everything seems possible, the most private, un­
speakable longings; but then arrives the Southern day,
as hard and brazen as the night was soft and dark.10
In the essay "Alas, Poor Richard," he writes:
. . . [the American Negro] is facing the unspeakably
dark, guilty, erotic past which the Protestant fathers
made him bury--for their peace of mind, and for their
power--but which lives in his personality and haunts
the universe yet. . . . And, he eventually found him­
self wandering in a no-man's land between the black
world and the white. ^
The major theme of "Come Out the Wilderness" seems to spring
directly from the passages quoted above.
Ruth Bowman, a
sensual colored girl from the South, loves a white man, Paul,
who needs this love but who represses the knowledge that his
unhappiness and guilt can be assuaged only by loving the
Negro as much as the Negro loves him.
Ruth, through whose consciousness the story is related,
is a symbol for the person wandering in that no-man's land
52
between the black world and the white.
Because of her very
nature, she must give love (her lovers treat it as sex)
freely to "the sons of the masters . . .
looking for arms to hold them."
roaming the world,
Ruth has accepted the Protes­
tant judgment that she is "black, dirty, and sinful."
But,
Baldwin’s tone plainly indicates that the reader is not to
accept this judgment of Ruth.
She is pure, innocent, de­
serving to be placed alongside other literary heroines who
are innocent, helpless victims of their loving natures.
White Protestantism, with its beliefs forced upon the first
slaves, is the real villain.
Guilt causes Ruth to reject her
first lover, a Negro, and in turn guilt causes her to accept
a succession of white lovers.
The theme of self-punishment
is introduced by Baldwin to emphasize her self-hatred and her
desire to punish herself by clinging to her lovers beyond the
time they have ceased to care for her.
no-man's land.
She is indeed in a
She has lost her identity; she has become a
whore.
Another motive for Ruth's masochism lies in her rela­
tionship with her brother, which contains a hint of incestuous
longing:
. . . her brother had grown too accustomed to thinking
of her as his prized, adored little sister to recognize
the changes that were occurring within her. This had
had something to do with the fact that his own sexual
coming of age had disturbed his peace with her--he
would, in good faith, have denied this, which did not
make it less true.
53
He is the one who called her "black, dirty, and sinful," and
it is his voice, never quieted, which drives her to seek
punishment and which prevents her from being able to fall in
love with one of her own race.
The other main characters are Paul, and Mr. Davis,
obviously a foil for Paul.
The two men represent the two
choices which lie before Ruth.
Paul, the struggling white
artist with little real talent, is sure to leave her and join
the procession of the other lovers who have deserted her.
Mr. Davis with his "black Sambo" profile is an executive in
the insurance company where Ruth works.
He too is from the
South, but he has adopted all the externals, at least, of
the Northern business executive--he wears meticulously cor­
rect clothing, smokes expensive cigars--and the question in
Ruth's mind is whether Mr. Davis can forgive her or will in­
tensify her shame, should he learn the truth about her.
He
represents the middle-class world, where the chief values are
found in security, and it seems unlikely that he has discarded
the Puritan training of his Southern boyhood, which offers
the most support for middle-class values.
The conflict is not resolved.
Ruth makes no choice;
in fact, she has begun to drink to escape the reality of her
situation.
pity.
The story ends in a scene of sentimental self-
Ruth drinks at a series of bars, walks among crowds of
people with tears running down her face, intermingled with
54
flakes of falling snow.
The conclusion is, "She did not know
where she was going."
The reader has been informed that Ruth has a job and is
equipped to create a way of life for herself, but she does
nothing.
Baldwin’s determinism plainly indicates that since
she is not responsible for her nature and situation, it is
useless to struggle.
But the reader is dismayed to find
that Ruth has learned nothing from her past experiences; she
is as immature when the story ends as she was while back in
the South.
Ruth is a medium for themes of Baldwin's essays:
"Manhattan is a city of frantic people (meaning all Americans)
who have lost any sense of what heights were; Negroes are
being hired in offices merely to offer concrete proof of
the interracial goodwill of the liberals; religion among
Northern Negroes is strongly mixed with an opportunistic
respectability and with ambitions to better society and their
own place in it . . . and what remained of true religion was
principally vindictiveness."
The myths of Negro sexuality are emphasized in the
story through statements like these:
"Negroes are less
hairy than whites, which proves which race had moved farthest
away from the ape"; Ruth forgets her guilt long enough to
exult over the fact that the white girls in the office are
"sexless Girl Scouts— they could never marry Mr. Davis, but
she has taken white men away from them."
55
What must be considered a serious flaw in this story
is the strain in the language, which results from over­
ingeniousness and rhetorical flashiness:
"Paul’s head has a
plantation of thickly curling hair; the telephone began to
seem--like a great, malevolent black cat; a cigarette is a
sublimatory tube; and Mr. Davis wears a rakishly tilted,
deafeningly conservative hat and astutely dulled shoes.”
Once more, Baldwin has made use of Negro music, weaving
the Negro spiritual into the background of the story.
The
title of the story is taken from a Negro spiritual, which
Ruth’s mother used to sing, and the memory of it recurs to
Ruth whenever she thinks of home.
Of course, to her, its
significance is that she was born into a wilderness; she has
not come out of it.
However, this motif lends itself to the
pessimistic tone of the story, helps to characterize Ruth,
unifies the story elements and enriches the reader's under­
standing of the Negro’s cultural tradition in the South.
On one level, the story is successful.
It is the type
which has just the right emotional appeal for the feminine
readers of Mademoiselle.
plea for pity.
It is a sob-story, a tear-jerker, a
The dialogue is desultory; long unbroken
passages of retrospection become monotonous and Ruth seems
to be a case-study of emotional illness.
Baldwin's tone
seems to say to the reader, "Look, this is what you have done
to us."
Just as one could notice a change in the tenor of
56
Baldwin’s essays after his return to America and his involve­
ment with spokemanship, so it appears, that his fiction has
become a tool, a weapon.
The last story to be considered in the discussion of
Baldwin’s short fiction, ’’This Morning, This Evening, So
Soon," first appeared in the September, 1960, issue of The
Atlantic Monthly,
It was reprinted in the Spring, 1961, issue
of Gornhill (London) and was included in 1961 in Martha Foley
and David Burnett’s The Best American Short Stories, a volume
dedicated to James Baldwin.
In 1966, it was included by
Langston Hughes in his anthology, The Best Short Stories by
Negro Writers.
The first-person narrator, who is never identified by
name (once Vidal calls him Chico, the name of the role he
played in the film which brought him stardom and wealth), is
a Negro actor-singer in Paris.
Having accepted an offer to
sing in an exclusive New York City club, followed by a movie
contract with a Hollywood studio, the narrator is faced with
the problem of how to face life again in America in an atmos­
phere of racial hostility, and how to protect his wife and
son from the crippling effects of race prejudice.
His Swedish
wife and their son have never experienced discrimination of
any kind, but the memory of his experiences of the past causes
the narrator to have nightmares of fear, even after twelve
years of residence in France.
57
John V. Hagopian praises this story highly in an article
published in the December, 1963, issue of C. L. A., particu­
larly for the artistic structure of the story which he divides
into three sections:
Family, Friend, and Strangers.
He says,
’’The story moves from the center of the unnamed narrator’s
experiences outward into public life and s o c i e t y . O n the
narrative level, this plan of organization suffices to re­
late the physical changes that occur in the narrator's life,
but it fails to reveal just how the interior changes in the
narrator's character correspond to these events.
The Negro
narrator, a self-exile in Paris, meets and marries Harriet,
a Swedish girl.
Thus he acquires a happy home, a perfect
wife, and a son, Paul.
Through the help of Vidal, a film
director, who is also his best friend, he learns to act,
becomes a star, and thereby, becomes both rich and famous.
In
Part Three, during a tour of night clubs and bars with Vidal,
the culmination of his career is reached as he receives the
adulation of his fans, including four American Negro college
students making a summer tour of Europe.
The narrator conveys these experiences, with the excep­
tion of Part Three, which takes place in the present, through
a series of flashbacks.
In Part One, the narrator looks back
over his eight years of married life with Harriet.
His remin­
iscences provide him with an opportunity to contrast the atti­
tudes toward interracial marriage in France and America.
a marriage as his could not have survived in America.
But
Such
58
what the narrator does not explore is the personal experience,
the inter-relationships that develop within the marriage of a
black man to a white wife.
All that the reader sees is a
perfect wife and mother, a loving, trusting son, and a happy
father.
He and Harriet never quarrel in their son's presence.
These questions come to the reader's mind:
quarrel?
How are the quarrels settled?
marriage achieved?
Over what do they
How was this perfect
The narrator says that although Harriet
comes from progressive Sweden, she has become beautifully oldfashioned.
Does this imply that she is completely subservient
to the wishes of her husband?
control:
Her chief asset is her self-
she never worries and she never loses her temper.
Her whole time now is taken up with learning about America so
that she can protect her husband and child against the trau­
matic experiences which the narrator expects to find in America.
What maturity the narrator has gained from this marriage is
not suggested.
Part Two deals with the narrator's experience with his
friend, the motion picture director, Vidal.
The narrator plays
the leading role in a film dealing with racial hatreds.
Vidal
forces him to act out his own hatreds in the play, and because
his acting is so true to life, he becomes a star overnight.
The implication is that the narrator has learned from this
experience; that he has matured enough to look at himself
honestly instead of nursing an attitude of self-pity; and that
he has achieved an identity through the therapeutic effects of
59
acting out his frustrations.
He can talk to Vidal as an
equal, but can he talk to white Americans without reverting
to his previous posture of abject humility?
Part Three deals with his experiences in the world
of strangers--a very limited world of nightclub patrons--the
public that fawns upon celebrities.
In fact, Vidal says that
his purpose for taking the narrator on a round of bars and
nightclubs is to complete the narrator's education.
"I thought,"
says Vidal, with a malicious little smile, "that your farewell
to Paris would not be complete without a brief exposure to
the perils of fame.
Perhaps it will help prepare you for
America, where, I am told, the populace is yet more carnivorous
than it is here."
And this experience shows the narrator as
having not only achieved a sense of equality with his wife and
friend, but also as having achieved a sense of superiority
over the public.
The narrator says,
It is marvelous to watch the face of the waiter as he
approaches, all smiles and deference and grace; not so
much honored by our presence as achieving his reality
from it; excellence, he seems to be saying, gravitates
naturally toward excellence.
And while the narrator seems to deride the obvious maneuvering
that goes on among the patrons of the night spots for a share
in his fame, he seems to receive it as his due.
However, he
demonstrates that fame does not make him a snob; he invites
four American Negro college students and Boona, a Tunisian
Negro, to join the party.
His forgiveness of Boona's theft
60
shows that his success does not make him forget those who are
the victims of racial prejudice.
The impact of this scene
is weakened by the fact that it seems contrived for the pur­
pose of allowing Baldwin to eulogize the four Negro college
students.
He almost becomes lyrical as he contrasts their
freshness, vitality, and intelligence with the jaded, sophis­
ticated patrons who are the typical habitues of Paris night
spots--the drunken blonde ex-mistress of an artist, the white
American students trying to live up to the legends of Paris,
and the white model who wants to join the party.
After the night's activities end, the narrator returns
home and says, "I feel very cheerful.
I don't know why."
The burden of the narrator's solution to his problem is thus
placed upon the reader.
At the beginning of the story the
narrator is worried because he yells at his son and is unable
to practice his music that day.
The reader is led to expect
that the narrator will come to grips with his problem, that
he will weigh the advantages and disadvantages of returning to
America to determine whether it is worthwhile to jeopardize
what he has gained in Paris.
His sister, Louisa, and the col­
lege students tell him that things have not changed in America.
His wife and Vidal emphasize the fact that he will make a lot
of money in America and than he can always come back to France.
Vidal's farewell remark to the narrator is too ambiguous for
the reader to solve.
these days.
!
"You must come back and see us, one of
Many of us depend on you for many things."
The
61
reader can only ask, "What things, and why?"
Baldwin creates
an illusion that almost tricks the reader into believing that
the narrator has actually solved his problem.
reader is aware that something is missing.
But the careful
He would like to
feel that the narrator has come to the decision that fear must
be faced, that one cannot run away from it.
But the evidence
in the story does not point to such a conclusion.
Thus Baldwin has written a modern fairy tale.
The hero-
narrator marries a member of another race and the result is a
perfect marriage; his friends help him to act out his own hat­
reds in the film and the result is stardom and wealth; and the
public reaction to his career is overwhelming adulation.
And
one supposes that he will find the same success in America.
But upon a careful examination of the dialogue in the story,
one finds that the fiction serves to express the polemics of
his essays.
The problems and opinions that Baldwin expresses
in the essays, "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,"
13
"Encounter on the Seine; Black Meets Brown,"
Question of Identity,
of the story.
lk
and "A
furnish the content of the dialogue
The flashbacks become tedious when interspersed
with such philosophical remarks as these:
For everyone’s life begins on a level where races, armies,
and churches stop. And yet everyone's life is always
shaped by races, churches, and armies . . .
After departure, only invisible things are left, perhaps
the life of the world is held together by invisible chains
of memory and loss and love. So many things, so many people,
departi and we can only repossess them in our minds.
62
The narrator cxnibits the hyoer sensitivity of the Negro
towards the whites.
Was it my imagination or was it true that [white
Americans] seemed to avoid my eyes?
They laughed--was it at me, or was it my imagination?
He repeats the theme that Negroes are forced by whites to
play a role in society, especially when in the presence of
a policeman.
I had once known how to pitch my voice precisely between
curtness and servility, and known what razor's edge of a
pickaninny's smile would turn away wrath. But I had
forgotten all the tricks on which my life had once de­
pended. Once I had been an expert at baffling these
people, at setting their teeth on edge, and dancing just
outside the trap laid for me.
(May the reader ask whether the narrator of this story is
the Peter of "Previous Condition," twelve years later?).
. . . [the black people] knew how to keep the white
folks happy, and it was easy--you just had to keep them
feeling like they were God's favor to the universe.
The narrator informs his readers again that white people
can't understand Negro music:
Just the same, no matter how industrious and brilliant
some of the musicians had been, or how devoted my
audience, they did not know, they could not know, what
my songs came out of. They did not know what was funny
about it. It was impossible to translate: It damn
well better be funny, or Laughing to keep from crying,
or What did I do to be so black and blue?
Baldwin is fond of saying in the essays that the Negro
knows and understands the white better than he understands
himself.
In the story, a few samples of the narrator's inside
information are:
63
They apparently equated privacy with the unspeakable
things they did in the bathroom or the bedroom, which
they related only to the analyst, and then read about
in the pages of best sellers. . . . Americans, who had
never treated me with respect, had no respect for each
other.
How can one be prepared for the spittle in the face, all
the tireless ingenuity which goes into the spite and fear
of small, unutterably miserable people, whose greatest
terror is the singular identity, whose ioy, whose safety,
is entirely dependent on the humiliation and anguish of
others ?
All the white people . . . needed, in one way or another,
to be reassured, consoled, to have their consciences
pricked but not blasted; could not, could not afford to
hear a truth which would shatter, irrevocably, their image
of themselves. It is astonishing the lengths to which a
person, or a people will go in order to avoid a truthful
mirror.
I bend down and Paul and I kiss each other on the cheek.
We have always done so--but will we be able to do so in
America? American fathers never kiss American sons.
And the narrator repeats Baldwin’s constant accusations
against the whites:
I've never understood why, if I have to pay for the
history written in the color of my skin, you should get
off scot-free.
During all the years of my life, . . . , I had carried
the menacing, the hostile, killing world with me everywhere.
No matter what I was doing or saying or feeling, one eye
had always been on the world--that world which I had
learned to distrust almost as soon as I learned my name,
that world on which I knew one could never turn one's
back, the white man's world.
. . . [the whites] want you to feel that you're not a man,
maybe that’s the only way they can feel like men.I
I always feel that I don't exist there, except in someone
else's--usually dirty--mind.
64
In addition to the themes voiced by the narrator, Vidal
also serves to voice Baldwin's ideas.
For example, he says,
Do you really think that you have escaped anything?
do not know all the things love cannot do.
You
During Vidal's encounter with the four Negro students,
the dialogue becomes unreal.
The Americans and British become
the targets of Vidal’s vituperative speeches in the following
examples:
Those English actresses who love to play putain [a
prostitute] as long as it is always absolutely clear
to the audience that they are really ladies. . . .
Ihey read . . . Fanny Hill, and they have their chauffeurs
drive them through Soho once or twice--and they come to
the stage with a performance so absolutely loaded with
detail, every bit of it meaningless, that there can be
•no doubt that they are acting.
It is what the British
call a triumph.
But I beg you not to confuse me with the happy people
of your country, who scarcely know that there is such a
thing as history. . . .
It seems extraordinarily infantile behavior, even for
Americans, from whom, I must say, I have never expected
very much in the way of maturity.
There is something very nice about them, something very
winning, but they seem so ignorant--so ignorant of life.
Perhaps it is strange, but the only people from your
country with whom I have ever made contact are black
people. . . . Perhaps it is because we in Europe, . . . ,
know about suffering. We have suffered here. You have
suffered, too. But most Americans do not yet know what
anguish is. It is too bad, because the life of the West
is in their hands.I
I cannot help saying that I think it is a scandal--and
we may all pay very dearly for it— that a civilized
nation should elect to represent it a man who is so simple
that he thinks the world is simple.
65
Nothing in Vidal’s experience in this story can explain
his attitudes in these statements, and one can only assume
that these arc Baldwin's opinions.
Characters used to discuss
such issues, as has been illustrated in these quotations, have
no individuality.
And the sum of these remarks is to show
that all Negroes are good and all white Americans are bad.
At
the time the narrator is making his film, Vidal asks him one
vital question.
"Who are you, then, and what good has it done
you to come to France, and how will you raise your son?
you teach him never to tell the truth to anyone?"
gives no answer.
Will
The narrator
One can assume that the dialogue represents
truths he feels he must tell someone.
On the other hand, the reader must not overlook the
fact that Baldwin is a powerful writer, and that his power
comes from his evocative language.
images connote violent images.
verbs such as these:
Both his language and his
His pages are sprinkled with
pricked, blasted, shattered, wrested,
stared; his favorite adjectives are hostile, killing, devastat­
ing, unspeakable, tremendous, enormous; and his adverbs suggest
action carried to a superlative degree.
A few are irrevocably,
hideously, extraordinarily, unutterably, and insolently; his
choice of nouns is similar:
nightmares, pressure, rage, skull,
war, misery, razors, anguish, fists, gutters, and hatred.
At
one point in the story, the narrator's sister says, "Language
is experience and language is power."
It is upon this that
Baldwin must rely to carry the weight of his fictional endeavors.
66
Baldwin's favorite symbols arc nightmares, mirrors,
yellow, and rats.
Nightmares are associated with policemen,
mirrors with one's identity, yellow with evil, and rats with
prostitution.
His figures of speech are violent:
life's
high flying steel ball; life is a mad dog who holds it in his
teeth; and New York City is like some enormous, cunning, and
murderous beast, ready to devour, impossible to escape.
Inasmuch as the protagonist of this story is an actorsinger, Baldwin has used various fragments from spirituals
and the blues as a background for the varying moods of the
narrator.
The title of the story is taken from a spiritual.
It seems rather ironic in its relation to the story.
While
apparently, the narrator's decision is made during the course
of one day, yet he has had to live in Paris for twelve years
before he can become the kind of person who can make such a
decision.
But he is pictured at the opening of the story as
lacking in confidence, and therefore, the ending of the story
seems incredible and contrived in addition to the fact that no
actual resolution has occurred.
One scene, near the end of the story, provides the best
explanation for the failure of this story.
Peter, one of the
American Negro students, sings a Negro spiritual with these
words :
Preach the word, preach the word, preach the word I
and the second stanza begins,
Testify!
Testifyl
67
Preach and testify best describe what Baldwin has done in this
story.
These devices properly fall within the domain of the
essay, not fiction.
In assessing Baldwin’s accomplishment in his first
ventures into the writing of fiction, one notes that distinct
patterns of thought can be traced in all of these stories:
the subject matter, for the most part, is autobiographical;
the themes are identical with those found in the essays; the
portrayal of the Negro condition is limited to a negative and
one-sided view which categorizes the Negro as a victim of en­
vironmental forces; the constant tone of the stories is bit­
ter, accusing, and filled with hatred; and the author’s pur­
pose for writing these stories is to persuade and influence
the reader in the direction of social reform.
One cannot quarrel with Baldwin on these points from a
personal standpoint.
But he is unable to control his experience
in such a way as to achieve distance between himself and his
experience, and that failure, as Mark Schorer says, is caused
because he has "no adequate resources of technique to separate
himself from his material, thereby to discover and to define
the meanings of his material, his contribution is not to fiction,
but to the history of fiction, and to social h i s t o r y . O n
the positive side, one must note that Baldwin’s ability to
use literary devices has greatly improved during this twelveyear period.
He relies heavily upon the use of the flashback
68
to present the situation and background of his characters'
lives.
In the early stories, he tends to make summary state­
ments which often skip necessary information in the backgrounds
of some of the characters, making them seem completely unreal.
Frequently he interrupts the flashback with philosophical
statements which are irrelevant and which retard the action
of the narrative.
However, in the later stories, he uses fewer
summary statements, adding variety and realism to the flash­
back with the introduction of scenes and dialogue.
One of his greatest strengths lies in his ability to
use highly connotative language to create strong sensory appeals
to the emotions of his readers.
At times, however, it becomes
contrived and artificial, neither appropriate to the subject
matter nor to the character who uses it.
And language which
merely arouses emotions is not very useful in providing the
reader with new insights.
Th.c experience of working in the short story form has
surely given Baldwin an opportunity to experiment with the
use of various literary techniques before entering upon the
writing of the novel.
That he has attempted to use various
points of view, various types of narrative structure, various
settings, and a miscellany of characters, is evident from the
examination of these stories.
Obviously, many of the flaws
contained in the stories arc the result of inexperience.
Baldwin is intelligent, unusually perceptive, and gifted in
69
his ability to use language.
One hopes that with added
experience and maturity, Baldwin will be able to achieve that
objectivity that is so lacking in these stories; that instead
of writing essays thinly disguised as fiction, he will be
able to accomplish what he set out to do, when he said "I want
to be an honest man and a good writer."'*'
70
CHAPTER IV
THE NOVELS
I.
Go Tell It On The Mountain
When James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On The
Mountain, appeared in 1952, many of his followers felt that
it marked the end of his long literary apprenticeship.
Ten
years of work had gone into the preparation of what appeared
to be a significant first novel.
the most part.
Critics were generous, for
For example, Walter Allen wrote of ’’the
dignity of a great subject finely handled";^ Steven Marcus
wrote that "there is a new and deeper understanding of his
culture as it has developed in the United States";
Irving
Howe commented that "Go Tell It On The Mountain is an enticing but minor work";
3
George E. Kent, in an essay on Bald­
win’s works, wrote that "the style is evocative with echoes
of Joyce and Faulkner";
John Henry Raleigh said that "Go
Tell It On The Mountain is impressive not only for its psy­
chology and its saga, but for its construction, which employs
a skilful time shift, and for a style rich in metaphor and
in a sad eloquence";'* and J. Saunders Redding wrote in the
New York Herald Tribune in May, 1953, "Go Tell It On The
Mountain *s beauty is the beauty of sincerity and of the
courageous facing of hard, subjective t r u t h . A n t h o n y West,
71
the lone reviewer whose reaction to the novel was negative,
wrote, ’’But for all its abundant virtues there is something
lacking in the book; its perfections are wooden and it is
without vitality in spite of all its r e a l i s m . A s Wallace
Graves points out in his discussion of Baldwin’s works, he
suspects "that because Baldwin was a Negro writing in these
times, for this audience, the book was not reviewed entirely
as a novel, but in the case of each reviewer partly as a
O
document."
From the evidence found in these brief reviews,
one notes that Go Tell It On The Mountain was praised for
qualities having little relation to its merit as a novel.
It
is my purpose, therefore, to examine the novel on the basis
of its literary merits, regardless of its topical interest,
which, without a doubt, contributed to its rise to bestsellerdom in 1953.
Go Tell It On The Mountain can be judged on two levels
as an autobiography, and as a work of art.
On the first
level, the novel contains a more nearly accurate account of
the facts of Baldwin’s life than is found in the other ver­
sions of his history related in the essays "Notes of a Native
Son"^ and "Down at the G r o s s . I n
the novel, the reader
(but not John) learns that Gabriel is not John's true father.
In the essays, Baldwin describes his stepfather, David
Baldwin, in terms essentially like those used in the novel.
Baldwin writes in his essay concerning his own conversion
72
that "he succumbed to a spiritual seduction"^ when, during
his fourteenth year, he became aware of evil within himself
and of evil in the world without.
The "church racket" proved
to be a "gimmick" that enabled him to survive.
"A deep,
adolescent cunning made him understand that here, in the
church, he could best his father on his own ground and here
he was immune from his father's punishment."
essay Baldwin also makes these comments:
12
In the same
"As I look back,
everything I did seems curiously deliberate, though it certainly did not seem deliberate then."
Completely disillu­
sioned after serving three years as a boy preacher, Baldwin
rejects the Christian religion as a fraud.
In his opinion,
the fact that many Negroes actively support the Christian
religion is "actually a fairly desperate emotional business,"
Ik
and the truth is that "religion operates here as a complete
and exquisite fantasy revenge:
white people own the earth
and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; the
bad will be punished and the good rewarded, for God is not
sleeping, the judgment is not far off.
It does not require a
spectacular degree of perception to realize that bitterness
is here neither dead nor sleeping, and that the white man,
believing what he wishes to believe, has misread the symbols.
The attitudes reflected in these remarks color the whole novel
with a pervasive and puzzling irony that prevents the reader
from accepting the authenticity of John's experience.
The
73
work, therefore, is a case study on the effects of religion
in the lives of the Negro people, designed to illustrate the
themes of the essays.
Baldwin establishes the ironic principle at once by his
use of epigraphs, consisting of biblical quotations and frag­
ments of Negro spirituals which point up the disparity between
the promises of God to his saints and the degradation of the
Negro's existence, which is proof that God has no intention
of keeping his promises
to his black children.
In addition to the use of epigraphs, Baldwin, as the
omniscient narrator, inserts ironic comments to warn the
reader that the reality of church religion fails to match
the illusion it offers its worshipers.
Some examples:
Tarry service officially began at eight, but it could
begin at any time, whenever the Lord moved one of the
saints to enter the church and pray.
It was seldom,
however, that anyone arrived before eight thirty, the
Spirit of the Lord being sufficiently tolerant to allow
the saints time to do their Saturday-night shopping,
clean their houses, and put their children to bed.
Neither did Elisha usually come anywhere near the church
on Saturday evenings; but as the pastor's nephew he was
entitled to certain freedoms; in him it was a virtue
that he came at all.
[the elders of the church] seemed to [Gabriel] so lax,
so nearly worldly; they were not like those holy prophets
of old who grew thin and naked in the service of the
Lord. These, God's ministers, had indeed grown fat, and
their dress was rich and various. They had been in the
field so long that they did not tremble before God any
more. They took God's power as their due, as something
that made the more exciting their own assured, special
atmosphere. They each had, it seemed, a bagful of ser­
mons often preached; and knew, in the careless lifting
74
of an eye, which sermon to bring to which congregation.
Though they preached with great authority, and brought
souls low before the altar . . . they did not give God
the glory, nor count it as glory at all; they might as
easily have been, Gabriel thought, highly paid circusperformers, each with his own special dazzling gift.
Gabriel discovered that they spoke jokingly, of the
comparative number of souls each of them had saved, as
though they were keeping score in a poolroom. Gabriel
was offended and frightened by this. He did not want,
ever, to hold the gift of God so lightly.
Prior to the conversion scene, before John is overtaken by a
hysterical seizure, he calculates the advantages to be derived
from a conversion:
Then he would no longer be the son of his father, but
the son of his Heavenly Father, the King. Then he need
no longer fear his father, for he could take, as it
were, their quarrel over his father's head to Heaven.
. . . Then he and his father would be equals. . . .
Then his father could not beat him anymore, or despise
him anymore. . . .
The hysteria is partly self-induced and partly the result of
the pressures from the world about him:
tations, "Your mama's counting on you.
his mother's expec­
You put your faith
in the Lord, Johnny, and He'll surely bring you out"; the
warning of the movie, in which the sinful blonde woman dies
unsaved; the warning from the street:
Roy's overt rebellion
against the white world in a street fight results in a bloody
wound; the admonition of his friend, Elisha, "Boy, ain't it
time you was thinking about your soul?"; and, the premonition
which comes from the unexpected presence of his aunt Florence
at the prayer meeting; all these combined to push him into a
hysterical state.
The ironic dialogue during the seizure
75
seems to be a continuation of the debate as to the value of
conversion, and tends to deny the validity of the whole ex­
perience.
Steven Marcus finds this scene flawed and makes
these comments:
There are two kinds of rhetoric at work in this passage:
The first--inflated (swallowed up in chaos) and is sup­
posed to convey John’s torment. The "ironic voice"
represents Mr. Baldwin's attempt to balance or deflate
the extravagance of his hero's religious experience.
This is characteristic of almost every passage in the
section that deals with conversion. Clearly neither term
is adequately represented, nor are the two impulses they
represent reconciled. The cliches in the first part of
the passage and the uneasiness in "filthy" and "nigger"
are sufficient evidence for the unsureness of touch which
blemishes the last section of the book. The truth is
that Mr. Baldwin is not sure of what he wants to say,
finally, and he disguises this uncertainty in an affected
distance from his material. This indecisiveness, with
its compensating impulse toward neatness, seems to me a
real fault.
It leads to a certain falseness of tone and
withholding of commitment--one might almost say of Mr.
Baldwin's own identity--that constrict the novel and
divest it of moral backbone.-*-"
Baldwin's vacillation is apparent in the scene that
follows the conversion.
John's first concern, as he rises
from the floor, is with the nature of his confrontation with
Gabriel.
When his father refuses to greet him with the holy
kiss, John's speech to him becomes, in effect, a declaration
of war against his father.
"I'm going to pray God . . .
keep me, and make me strong . . .
to stand . . .
to
to stand
against the enemy--and against everything and everybody . . .
that wants to cut down my soul."
(Italics mine).
John's speech to Elisha on the way home from the church
also hints that John docs not expect his conversion to last.
76
He says, "Elisha, no matter what happens to me, where I go,
what folks say about me, no matter what anybody says, you
remember--please remember--I was saved.
I was there."
This
is the kind of evasion which has appeared before in both the
essays and the short stories.
To allow John to experience a
truly spiritual rebirth should result from the inevitability
of his situation, and the honesty of his choice ought to be
evident in his reactions following the experience.
Baldwin
seems to be determined to let the reader know that John is
not saved.
John becomes a puppet, a victim of the forces of
his world.
The result is that the reader is asked to pity
John (and Baldwin).
While the use of irony contributes to the flaws in
Part 3, the better writing results in part from the objec­
tivity of the ironic viewpoint.
Florence and Gabriel are im­
pressive figures, drawn by the skilful blending of scene and
summary in Part 2, sharply delineated against the Southern
ante-bellum background of their youth.
The religion, which
enables their mother to endure slavery, becomes the force in
their lives which warps the souls of these two:
Florence, who
rejects religion, is embittered by self-hatred and hatred of
Gabriel; Gabriel embraces religion for the power it gives
him, and he becomes a self-righteous fanatic, feared by all
his family.
The most dramatic scene in the novel is in the
confrontation of Gabriel and Esther, where Esther informs
77
Gabriel that she is pregnant.
His rejection of his responsi­
bility for Esther and their child shows the hollow mockery of
religion in his life.
The title of Part 2, "The Prayers of the Saints," is
ironical when applied to the prayers of Florence and Gabriel,
but it becomes sentimental when applied to the prayer of
Elizabeth and her memory of Richard, the father of her illegiti­
mate son, John.
Baldwin abandons irony in the chapter which
describes John’s parents.
Elizabeth seems to be a copy of
Ruth, the chief character in an early short story, "Come Out
the Wilderness."
She is the fallen innocent, the victim of
her environment and of her own unselfish, loving nature.
She
is unable to condemn either Richard or her father for their
weaknesses, and she romanticizes both as would a child.
win’s treatment of Richard is equally sentimental.
Bald­
Richard
is said to be intelligent and sensitive, which implies that
John's intelligence and sensitivity have been inherited from
Richard.
The characters of Richard and Elizabeth are developed
by summary statements rather than by scenes and dialogue.
The
reader is told that Richard wants an education and enjoys going
to museums.
But one never learns what Richard is reading or
studying.
In a degree, Baldwin succeeds in this first novel.
craftsmanship shows a marked improvement in contrast to his
short stories.
Structural unity is achieved by his placing
His
78
the historical background of the family within the framework
of John’s experiences which precede and follow the prayer
meeting.
Using the flashback technique, Baldwin very skil­
fully interweaves the past and present circumstances of his
cultural heritage within the sequential structure of the
prayer meeting.
II.
Giovanni’s Room
Baldwin wrote his second novel Giovanni1s Room between
1953 and 1955 in Southern France.
and his characters arc white.
His subject is homosexuality
Hints of the homosexual theme
appear in his first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain, in
John's attraction to Elisha.
Baldwin discusses the subject
at length in the essay, "The Male P r i s o n , w h i c h was first
printed in The New Leader in the issue of December 13, 1954,
and included later in Nobody Knows My Name in 1961.
The major
arguments of the essay are first, that homosexuality is a
natural condition; second, that "communion between the sexes
in America has become so sorely threatened that we depend
more and more on the strident exploitation of externals, as,
for example, the breasts of Hollywood glamour girls and the
18
mindless grunting and swaggering of Hollywood he-men";
third, that "when men can no longer love women they also cease
to love or respect or trust each other, which makes their
isolation complete";
and fourth, that "today's unlucky de­
viate can only save himself by the most tremendous exertion
79
of all his forces from falling into an underworld in which
he never meets either men or women, where it is impossible to
have either a lover or a friend, where the possibility of
genuine human involvement has altogether ceased.
When this
. . .
20
possibility has ceased, so has the possibility of growth."
Now, several years later, Baldwin says of this essay, "That
was meant as a commentary on myself.
I was accusing myself,
perhaps not directly enough, of a certain fear and a certain
hypocrisy. "
A recent biography of Baldwin's life by Fern Marja
Eckman, published in the summer of 1966, provides additional
enlightenment on Baldwin's attitudes toward these themes.
From an interview with Baldwin, Mrs. Eckman recalls these ob­
servations:
What is wrong with the United States, . . . , is that
precisely too much is forbidden, love above all, with
crippling consequences for the populace; and that this,
in turn, has swerved white Americans from sexual health
to the frantic sexual exploitation of the Negro, who has
been conveniently metamorphosed into a phallic fetish.22
Baldwin explains that homosexuality is a recurrent motif
in his fiction because during his adolescence in Green­
wich Village, his years were terrifying not only because
of white women, but also because of white men.23
And the root of the whole problem, as he sees it, is
not a fear of men going to bed with men.
It's a fear
of anybody touching anybody.
In Italy, you know, men
kiss each other and boys go to bed with each other. And
no one is marked for life. No one imagines that--and
they grow up, . . . , and they have children and raise
them. And no one ends up going to a psychiatrist or
turning into a junkie because he's afraid of being
touched.2^
80
In Italy they understand that people were born to touch
each other.2B
And, in this country, what we call homosexuality is a
grotesque kind of--of waxworks. Which is the other side
of what we call heterosexuality here. °
It’s not sex at all. It's pure desperation.
It’s
clinical. It comes out of the effort to tell one’s
self a lie about what human life is like.
It comes out
of the attempt to cling to definitions which cannot
contain anybody *s life.27
At another point in the same book, one learns that Baldwin
conceives of Giovanni *s Room (his favorite among his books)
as a fable illustrating a basic tenet of his philosophy:
"That experience which destroys innocence also leads one back
to it.
It is his conviction . . . that the man who struggles
to preserve his innocence is doomed to sink into corruption." 28
Baldwin states elsewhere:
It is still, I think, the masculine necessity to look
outward on life as it is, . . . , to face himself as he
is: neither is ever as we would like it to be. But
before anything can really be dealt with, it must be
faced. David’s dilemma is the dilemma . . . of many
men of his generation; by which I do not so much mean
„„
sexual ambivalence as a crucial lack of sexual authority.
I don't think people go around looking for sexual ful­
fillment. They go around looking for love.
I don't
think they can have anything resembling sexual fulfillment
unless they--unless they do love. 0
Baldwin’s views, expressed in the biography and in the essay,
provide a basis for an understanding of Giovanni1s Room in
terms of subject and purpose.
Needless to say, the public response to such a contro­
versial subject produced a variety of comments.
Publishers'
81
blurbs on the cover of the Dell paperback edition are repre­
sentative of opinions voiced by the readers of popular liter­
ature.
A few samples will suffice.
James Baldwin's most conspicuous gift is his ability to
find words that astonish the reader with their boldness
even as they overwhelm him with their rightness. . . .
One rejoices in the skill with which he writes.
--The New York Times
Immediate emotional impact . . . absorbing.
--Washington Post & Times Herald
I bow to none in my admiration for Mr. Baldwin's writings.
The intensity with which he endows ideas and emotions is
very nearly miraculous. And there is plenty of intensity
and emotion in this novel. His subject is violent . . .
and it is a tribute to Mr. Baldwin that he is able to
lend it some beauty, some dignity.
--Harpers
This truly remarkable achievement is possible because of
Mr. Baldwin's intense sincerity and genuine ability to
understand and to pity.
--Saturday Review
As one can see from these comments, the book caught the public
fancy, and it soon rose to bcst-sellerdom.
Later on, as
critics began to examine the book as a novel, the tenor of the
public reaction changed from acclamation to censure.
One
critic, Irving Howe, wrote in 1963, "Baldwin's second novel,
31
Giovanni's Room, seems to be a flat failure."
Other critics
were not quite so unkind, but the consensus of opinion was
that this novel was inferior to his first.
82
Giovanni* s Room is written in the form of a confession.
David, the protagonist-narrator, spends the night before
Giovanni’s execution, alone in a house in Southern France, re­
calling the events of his past life which led him up to this
moment.
The plot is slight, based upon David's homosexual
encounter with Giovanni and upon his heterosexual experience
with Hella Lincoln.
At the end of his confession, David
boards a bus to return to Paris, Giovanni's body lies in a
morgue, and Hella is somewhere at sea on her way to America.
The protagonist in ordinary literary confessions re­
lates his past, usually as an apology or as a search for some
value which seems necessary for his continued existence.
If
the confession takes the form of a quest, as it does in this
novel, the protagonist normally hopes to come to some inner
resolution.
We learn early in the novel that David, a blond
Anglo-Saxon American, now a student in Paris, having had
several frightening homosexual encounters in his past, has
come to Paris to find himself.
But David achieves no resolu­
tion and gains no new insights.
Thus the novel proves to be only a case study of the
s u ffe rin g s
of
h o m o s e x u a lity .
D a v id
re v e a ls
in
th e
f ir s t
paragraph that he has not found a solution to his disturbance.
I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good.
I shall take the train to Paris anyway. The train will
be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and,
even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class
seats will be the same, and _I will be the same. (Italics
mine).
83
A few pages further on contain a similar statement:
I think now that if I had had any intimation that the
self I was going to find would turn out to be only the
same self from which I had spent so much time in flight,
I would have stayed at home. But, again, I think I knew,
at the very bottom of my heart, exactly what I was doing
when I took the boat for France.
Structurally, the confession is divided into two
parts.
Part One provides the reader with a rather sketchy
background of the past lives of David, Giovanni, and Hella,
sets the scene in the worst dives to be found in Paris, and
then proceeds to entangle the lives of the three major
characters in various sexual encounters.
Part Two examines
David's two sexual excursions--homosexual with Giovanni, and
heterosexual with Hella.
The first encounter ends with the
physical death of Giovanni, and the second with the spiritual
death of Hella.
III.
Another Country
Another Country, is, in a sense, a sequel to Giovanni1s
Room.
Giovanni1s Room contains a plea for the recognition of
the homosexual, who, like the Negro, is an object of scorn and
a victim of prejudice.
But in Another Country, Baldwin plots
his novel on the premise that both homosexuality and inter­
racial marriage are acceptable realities within the milieu he
creates.
Certainly, the controversial and sensational nature
of the novel's subject matter was sufficient to rocket it to
the top of the best-seller list.
The reactions of the critics
84
were violent:
the book was either highly praised--MSearing
. . . violent . . . brilliantly and fiercely toldM--in the
New York Times (statements contained on the covers of the Dell
paperback edition), or it was condemned— "Another Country is
a failure on the grand scale . . . The plot consists of little
more than a series of occasions for talk and fornication."
32
For the ordinary reader, one of the most confusing
problems connected with the book is to discover the author’s
intentions in writing it.
may turn for answers:
There are two sources to which one
first, to the essay, "Letter From a
Region in My Mind," printed in The New Yorker for November,
1962 (later the essay became the major portion of The Fire
Next Time); and second, to Baldwin’s statements made to his
biographer, Fern Marja Eckman, in The Furious Passage of James
Baldwin.
In his essay, Baldwin makes the following statement of
his philosophy of life:
To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the
force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all
that one does from the effort of loving to the breaking
of bread.33
His impression of the American scene is that
We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than
we know, and the American dream has therefore become
something much more closely resembling a nightmare,
on the private, domestic, and international levels.3*+
The following remarks quoted from the biography reveal
Baldwin's attitude toward Another Country:
85
People got mad at Another Country and the reason they
got mad Is because it's true. And it's much worse than
that. One of the reasons that homosexuality, for
example, occupies so large a place in Another Country
is because it's an American phenomenon in that book-and in my experience.
It would not ever happen that way
in any other country of the world.35
What I was trying to do was to create for the first
time my own apprehension of the country and the world.
I understood that if I could discharge venom, I could
discharge love (they frighten me equally). When I was
a little boy, I hated all white people, but in this
book I got beyond hate.
I don’t care what anybody says;
I faced my life by that book, and it's a good book.
It’s as honest as I can be.3o
From the foregoing quotations one can be sure that
Baldwin is deadly serious and that his purpose is to tell the
truth about conditions in America, to explain his definition
of love, and to demonstrate that the acceptance of the homo­
sexual and the Negro as lovers is the way to create another
country, wherein love is the salvation of the world.
This
is a large order and the reader has the right to assume that
the author will present his case, using carefully controlled
situations, among a representative sampling of the American
populace.
Upon the basis of Baldwin's premise that homosex­
uality and black skins are natural conditions of life in
America, one can now proceed to examine his treatment of the
subject.
If one were to ask why Baldwin has chosen the locale
of Greenwich Village and Harlem for the presentation of his
case (an area which hardly seems to be a fair representation
of America), Baldwin would, no doubt, reply, "If love can
86
save the assorted characters that one finds in this coldest
of all cities, then love can save all of America.”
The
characters who live and work in the sterile atmosphere of
the ghetto and Bohemia are chosen to represent the various
attitudes found in America toward race and toward sex.
Eric
Jones, the homosexual, represents the Southern aristocracy
who turn to the Negro under cover of the darkness for love;
Leona is the Southern poor-white woman, who is starved for
sexual love, but who cannot find it in the South because of
the male poor-white's hatred of the sexual virility of the
Negro; Richard Silenski, a descendant of a Polish carpenter
(another Lovelace) rapes the white woman of America (Cass,
his wife, had sexual relations with him before their mar­
riage) and then puts her on a pedestal, offering her wealth
and success rather than the sexual and spiritual love which
she needs to retain her femininity; Cass Silenski, from
Puritan forebears, is a true Clarissa in that she uses sex
as a trap to get her man so that she can begin to reform him;
Steve Ellis, a wealthy Northern liberal, prostitutes art
by using modern advertising methods to take advantage of the
American public's appetites for sex and sensationalism, and
he creates stars from second-rate authors (Richard) and from
untalented singers (Ida), who are black and sexy; Vivaldo,
the Irish-Italian would-be author, is also a white liberal,
but unlike Ellis, he refuses to write trash even though it
87
means poverty; Rufus Scott and his sister Ida represent the
two extremes of protest in the modern Negro.
Rufus accepts
the image of "nigger" projected upon him by the white world
and is so embittered by self-hatred that he destroys himself.
Ida, filled with racial pride, resolves to enact vengeance
upon any or all whites for what they have done to her race
and to Rufus.
How then can love be made to work among such a disparate
group of individuals, alienated from each other by blind
prejudices, fantasies, social pressures, and lack of selfknowledge?
John S. Lash develops a very convincing analysis
of this problem in which he suggests that Baldwin is a reli­
gionist who has created a value system that can transfigure
the self in a modern cult of phallicism.
He clarifies his
meaning in the following words:
[Baldwin] says, in effect, that the search of man for
self-realization conies ultimately to a point of genital
cognition, that a morality and an ethic gonadic in in­
ception are instinct in the bodily intercourse of man
with man, that in the naked moment of sexual confrontation
between man and man are to be found truth stripped of
hypocrisy and deceit, self-fulfillment beyond the neces­
sity for proof and measurement, peace and security re­
uniting the male and masculine flesh and spirit.37
Baldwin does seem to advocate such a transcendent form of
love and in one respect the cult can be said to be successful.
Eric, the homosexual, is the one through whom Cass, Vivaldo,
and Yves regain their sense of wholeness.
Nevertheless, the
characters who turn to Eric, as one turns to a priest, choose
88
to continue in the heterosexual way of life, that relation­
ship, in which love is usually marred by hypocrisy, deceit,
and the possessiveness of one of the partners.
What Baldwin
really proposes is that love of self is necessary for selffulfillment.
The one who does not love himself cannot love
anyone else.
But Baldwin does not extend the meaning of love
beyond the sexual encounters.
He does not demonstrate how
love can produce peaceful relationships in the humdrum acti­
vities of life.
Eric is a static character manipulated by
Baldwin to illustrate his thesis that the only pure, innocent
love one can find exists only between male and male.
admits that such experiences are rare:
Eric
most of the time,
"it's all a kind of superior calisthenics, a great challenge,
a great test, a great game," but not love.
Thus, in spite
of the fact that Baldwin manipulates the relationships in almost
every possible combination of sexual encounters, the experiment
fails.
The test of reality for all of the characters is what
one apprehends through his senses, and the ecstasy of orgasm
is momentary and cannot be prolonged.
The characters do not
demonstrate a living response of their whole beings to life.
The response involves only sexual satisfaction.
This novel, then, represents Baldwin's greatest attempt
to deal with love, a theme of universal importance and interest
to all mankind.
But the novel also represents Baldwin's
greatest failure to date in using the novel form.
The novel
89
fails for many reasons:
Baldwin depends upon his rhetorical
powers to carry along an almost plotless story; the pace
drags as Baldwin uses flashback scenes to convey incidents
which would be far more dramatic if related in the present
tense.
The flashbacks become tedious from the inclusion of
too much editorializing and summarizing by the author, and
from the fact that often, the flashback merely dwells on how
much the character suffers or how he feels after sexual
intercourse.
The dialogue is insipid and fails to reveal the
sensitivity which the characters are supposed to possess.
Surprisingly, the characters can be very drunk, yet their
speech and actions remain unchanged.
However, the characters do not voice ideas which
have grown out of the experiences in their lives; they merely
serve as a platform from which Baldwin can voice his own
opinions.
The obscenities which the characters use in their
speech serve no purpose such as the revelation of character.
Baldwin uses obscenities to illustrate his belief that white
Americans regard sex as dirty and hence use dirty words to
discuss it.
The descriptions of the sexual encounters are
too realistic and imply that Baldwin believes he is writing
for an audience of voyeurs.
Not much is left to the reader’s
imagination.
In addition to these flaws, Baldwin introduces too
many unrelated themes which serve only to give added length
90
to the novel, distracting the reader’s attention from the
main theme.
For example, he discusses the writing of novels
and makes these comments:
He did not seem to know enough about the people in his
novel. They did not seem to trust him. They were all
named, more or less, all more or less destined, the
pattern he wished them to describe was clear to him. But
it did not seem clear to them. He could move them about
but they themselves did not move. He put words in their
mouths which they uttered sullenly, unconvinced. With
the same agony, or greater, with which he attempted to
seduce a woman, he was trying to seduce his people; he
begged them to surrender up to him their privacy. And
they refused--without, for all their ugly intransigence,
showing the faintest desire to leave him. They were
waiting for him to find the key, press the nerve, tell
the truth. Then, they seemed to be complaining, they
would give all he wished for and much more than he was
now willing to imagine.
What is ironic to the reader of Another Country is that these
criticisms might very well apply to it.
Another theme is middle-class life.
Much time is
spent disparaging the middle class and its values although
no accurate picture of middle-class society is presented.
Vivaldo regards his middle-class family with dislike:
Everybody: his sister and his brother-in-law, his
brother and father and mother, the uncles and aunts and
cousins, and the resulting miasma of piety and malice
and suspicion and fear. The invincible chatter of
people, concerning people who had no reality for him,
the talk about money, of children's illnesses, of
doctor's bills, of pregnancies, of unlikely and unlovely
infidelities occurring between ciphers and neuters in a
vacuum, the ditchwater-dull, infantile dirty stories,
and the insane talk about politics. They should, really,
all of them, still be living in stables with horses and
cows, and should not be expected to tax themselves with
matters beyond their comprehension.
91
Similar opinions are found among all the characters in the
novel.
They claim the right to make such accusations based
upon superficial knowledge of the real life that exists in
such a group.
And although the middle-class values of thrift
and industry are discredited, the constant cause of the dis­
enchantment of these characters is that they cannot make the
big time.
Baldwin attacks religion by condemning some of the
basic tenets of the Christian Church.
Any religion that
makes one feel guilty is rejected by Baldwin.
guilt after committing adultery.
to be fun.
Cass feels no
Eric says that sin ought
Vivaldo rejects his church because it teaches
its members to despise the flesh.
Vivaldo and Eric are the followers of Baldwin's code.
Vivaldo says, "Let's see what happens.
Let's go for broke. . ."
Eric's philosophy has no standards:
Honor: He knew that he had no honor which the world
could recognize. His life, passions, trials, loves,
were, at worst, filth, and, at best, disease in the eyes
of the world, and crimes in the eyes of his countrymen.
There were no standards for him because he could not
accept the definitions, the hideously mechanical jargon
of the age. He saw no one around him worth his envy,
did not believe in the vast, gray sleep which was called
security, did not believe in the cures, panaceas, and
slogans which afflicted the world he knew; and this meant
that he had to create his standards and make up his
definitions as he went along.
It was up to him to find
out who he was, and it was his necessity to do this, so
far as the witchdoctors of the time were concerned, alone.
The particular daring these characters exhibit is limited to
the breaking of sexual mores and the use of drugs.
But many
92
of the characters sanction their unconventional behavior by
rationalizing in this fashion:
"Well, hell, if people keep telling you you ain’t no
good . . . you bound to turn out pretty bad.”
’’Maybe, now I'll behave like what you think I am.”
’’Well, if we've got the name, we might as well have the
game is how I see it.”
Baldwin has said many times that the Negro in the eyes
of the white is a phallic symbol.
Baldwin makes no effort in
Another Country to change that image.
On the contrary, there
is emphasis throughout the novel on the sexual prowess and
virility of the Negro.
Cass and Steve Ellis are sexual beggars.
They are filled with sexual longing whenever they see a Negro
or anyone with a dark skin.
The superiority of the Negro
over the white is shown in other ways.
Ida's tone of vindic­
tiveness reflects the menace and violence found in The Fire
Next Time.
She says to Cass:
. . . wouldn't you hate all white people if they kept you
in prison here? They keep you here because you're
black, . . . » while they go around jerking themselves
off with all that jazz about the land of the free and
the home of the brave. . . . I wish I could turn myself
into one big fist and grind this miserable country to
powder.
One conclusion seems evident.
Baldwin lacks a basic
belief in the dignity and goodness of man and he himself denies
the values which he affirms at times in the novel.
He proposes
to solve man's problems through a form of transcendent love.
But, in the words of Rufus, just before he commits suicide:
93
Many white people and many black people, chained together
in time and space, and by history, and all of them in a
hurry. In a hurry to get away from each other . . . ,
but we ain’t never going to make it.
Before his impoverished characters can even find ecstasy in
sexual relationships, they must be fortified or numbed with
one drink after another.
They want to receive love, but they
are afraid to give love.
The distortion of life pictured in the novel seems
designed as a form of propaganda to present the pathos of the
situation of the homosexual and the Negro in America.
The
characters succumb to the disintegration which they see about
them.
Baldwin might have given these characters some dig­
nity, had he allowed them to see the absurdity of their
lives, but they cling to self-pity, saying that they are
trapped, unable to do anything for themselves.
Another
Country does not deal with the common life of American society.
It deals only with a fringe area and Baldwin's treatment of
this peripheral area contains a grotesqueness that neither
solves the problems of his characters nor offers a set of
values which will allow the members of modern society to
transcend the dilemma of their meaningless existence.
94
CHAPTER V
THE PLAYS
It is not surprising that James Baldwin turned to the
theater to find another audience to whom he could preach his
messages of protest.
His first play, The Amen C o m e r , was
written in 1953 and produced the same year at Howard University.
In March, 1964 it opened for a short run in Los Angeles, and
it was produced in New York City at the Ethel Barrymore
Theater, where it played a limited engagement after opening
on April 15, 1965.
The subject matter of religious fanaticism
is reminiscent of Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On The
Mountain (1952).
The first act of the play, published in the July,
1954, issue of Zero Magazine, is the only portion of the play
available to the reading public.
Therefore the comments on
the play are limited to that portion.
The action moves
slowly and the exposition is introduced rather clumsily--e.g.,
the opening speech, a prayer, informs the audience (and God)
that sinful Luke is dying; that his wife is absent doing the
Lord's work in Philadelphia, and that the members of the
church next door have prayed for Luke all night long.
Sister
Moore announces the thesis of the play in her sixth speech
following the prayer.
95
You mean she got the right to leave her family, go off
and leave her husband here to die--just because she
want to be the pastor of the church in Phillie and this
here church, too?
From some of the reviews of the play during its New
York run, one learns that the critics were more impressed with
the performance of Bea Richards in the role of Sister Margaret
than they were with the play itself.
John McCarten in his
review of the New York performance made these remarks:
The trouble is that his dialogue is all too often
plethoric and his theme . . . too discursive to com­
mand undivided attention for the length of a threeact play.i
Another critic found the play "plodding, banal, and shame­
lessly m a u d l i n . L a w r e n c e E. Lucas, writing in The Catholic
World says,
Baldwin's thesis, . . . , seems to be that for too many
socially outcast and poverty-stricken Negroes, religion
is an escape from the realities of life.3
But Father Lucas praises the play for getting across the
.
k
basic message of Christ, the message of love.
The consen­
sus of opinion was that Baldwin, like many another writer of
fiction, had difficulty in adjusting his writing to the
dramatic inode.
In 1958, at the invitation of Elia Kazan, Baldwin spent
some time working in the theatre as a kind of playwright-in­
training.
During this tirue he dramatized Giovanni1s Room,
but it was never performed for the public.^
Blues For Mister
Charlie, his next play, opened at the ANTA Theater on
96
April 23, 196U, and ran for four weeks.
The play is based
upon the case of Emmett Till, murdered in Mississippi in 1955.
His white murderer is acquitted and later admits his guilt
openly.
Baldwin dedicated the play to the memory of Medgar
Evers, his widow and his children, and to the memory of the
dead children of Birmingham.
The play is a violent protest
against the inhumanity of these deaths.
Mrs. Eckman, in her biography, describes the audience
reaction to the play:
Most of the Negroes responded to the murderous lines
with the laughter of recognition and catharsis, but
g
many of the whites reacted with unsheathed antagonism.
The reviews of the play were derogatory for a number
of reasons.
One reviewer condemned the play for its "bitter
blasts of rasping rhetoric, its prolix passages of meandering
and often tedious dialogue."^
Another reviewer states that
although the play has no "direct plot-line, the scenes weave
in and out of one another like the segments of a nightmare
from which one awakes screaming.
Yet it is an expressionis-
tic outcry that captures the distilled agony of this racially
tormented, mid-twentieth century America."®
Allan Lewis, in
a discussion of recent plays dealing with racial themes, makes
these comments on Blues For Mister Charlie:
Most such plays, like Blues For Mister Charlie, have been
polemics rather than drama, expressions of: hate and
channels for emotional release. They have been unduly
praised and given credit for dramatic power they did not
possess.9
97
Language taboos are gone and four-letter words freely
used. Richness of imagery and subtle suggestions have
given way to abusiveness and vulgarity.10
David Littlejohn in a recent study on the writing of American
Negroes makes this fierce denunciation of the play:
Blues for Mister Charlie betrays serious imaginative
disability.
It is an essay in artless bullying, not a
play. Its wicked South is faked, its white villains are
flat collages of prejudice cliches . . . There are playable,
even moving moments, bits of ritual drama ("Blacktown"
talks to "Whitetown"), intriguing shifts back and forth
in time. But the dialogue . . . is hopeless: faked banter,
faked poetry, doctrinaire racism, dated slang, all con­
flated with artificial violence and obscenity.!!
Susan Sontag, in her discussion of the contemporary scene in
the American theatre, says,
The Negro is fast becoming the American theater’s leading
mask of virtue. James Baldwin's Blues For Mister Charlie
is a sermon. But it is a sermon of a new type. In
Blues For Mister Charlie, Broadway liberalism has been
vanquished by Broadway rac ism.
For it is indeed an extraordinary sermon that is being
preached. Baldwin is not interested in dramatizing the
incontestable fact that white Americans have brutally
mistreated Negro Americans. What is being demonstrated
is not the social guilt of the whites, but their infer­
iority as human beings. This means, above all, their
sexual inferiority.!'*
Considered as art, Blues For Mister Charlie runs aground
for some of the same reasons it stalls as propaganda.
. . . this play gets bogged down in repetitions, incoher­
ence, and in all sorts of loose ends of plot and motive.
For example: it is hard to believe that in a town beset
by civil rights agitation and with a race murder on its
hands, the white liberal, Parnell, could move so freely,
with so little recrimination, from one community to
another. Again: it is not credible that Lyle, who is
Parnell’s close friend, and his wife aren’t bewildered
and irate when Parnell secures Lyle's arraignment on the
charge of murder. Again: from what we are shown of the
romance struck up between Richard and Juanita--which
98
begins only a few days before Richard is killed--it is
unconvincing that Juanita should proclaim that what she
has learned from Richard is how to love. More important:
The whole confrontation between Richard and Lyle, with
its explicit tones of masculine sexual rivalry, seems
inadequately motivated.
Richard simply has not enough
reason, except that the author wants to say these things,
to introduce the theme of sexual envy on all the occasions
that he does.i^
Mrs. Eckman notes that
Even the conscientiously hip Greenwich Village Weekly,
The Village Voicet protested, "I can’t think of any motive
but psychic sadism for Baldwin's harping on the traditional
theme of Negro sexual prowess versus the white man’s
limited potency.15
Mrs. Eckman declares that Baldwin's intentions were widely
misunderstood.
Baldwin himself declared in a statement to
her:
It was very important for me . . . to have Richard Henry
as offensive and brash and stupid as he is. . . . Sure,
he had no right to talk to anybody like ~tKat. I know
that. But do you have the right to shoot him? That’s
thequestion.
For the reader of plays, Blues For Mister Charlie is
a play of little literary value for a number of reasons.
The
language is chosen to shock an audience rather than to communi­
cate, advance the action, or create the unfolding of character.
Too many of the speeches are set pieces, monologues to express
Baldwin's opinions.
The result is polemics rather than art.
The flashback technique is so clumsy and confusing that the
action drags and all dramatic force is lost.
The characters,
lacking adequate motivation, are crude stereotypes of the
Uncle Tom figure, the alcoholic liberal, the old Southern
99
mammy, and others.
The courtroom scene in Act III becomes a
travesty on law and justice.
Nothing that can be called real
evidence is presented by either side.
And what promised to
be a drama of racial conflict becomes the vehicle for the
sexual insult of the whites, with the Negro having the last
word.
Thus the play fails both as art and as propaganda.
What it succeeds in doing is telling the whites how much Negroes
hate them.
And what Baldwin has accomplished, whether inten­
tionally or not, is a disservice to the race he represents.
The debased image of the Negro presented in Blues For Mister
Charlie alienates all those individuals working to improve
the racial situation, be they black or white.
100
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
That Baldwin has attempted much and has achieved the
reputation of "most articulate Negro" at the present time is
a well-known fact.
and as a writer.
He is articulate both as a public speaker
Recognized by many as the most important
Negro writer of the day, a recognition based upon the number
of publications to his credit and upon the impact of his
opinions upon his black and white audiences, his position in
the contemporary literary scene must be measured in terms of
his artistic achievement, regardless of the fact that he is
a Negro, that his output is prolific, and that his popularity
is confirmed by the fact that three of his books have been
best sellers.
While the quality of his work is uneven in all areas,
the general consensus of opinion would rank his achievements
lowest in drama, mediocre in fiction, and high in the essay.
Baldwin has never lost the urge to preach and exhort and this
tone characterizes all his writing.
The more he has become
involved with the civil rights movement, the more strident
this tone has become in his writing.
The message in both his
fiction and his non-fiction is apocalyptic, filled with
101
threats and exhortations to the whites to change their ways
or else "be prepared to begin paying their dues."*'
Because of the intensity of his feelings, his works
contain an evocative power.
His style is designed to suggest
sense impressions, to evoke odors, sounds, colors, and the
feel of things with a vividness and intensity which approx­
imate actual experience.
His diction ranges from the concrete
idiom of the ghetto to the impassioned Biblical oratory of the
Negro preacher.
As Raymond Schroth, S.J., says,
His strength is his ability to make his experience live
for others, to let us know what it feels like to be
poor, emotional, lost, and black.2
In addition to his ability to use evocative language,
there is that of bringing whites a Negro point of view and of
arousing guilt in the white man for his part in the shameful
history of the Negro in the United States.
He forces his
reader to look at himself and to question his own life.
Baldwin is intelligent and perceptive, but the sheer
force of rhetoric cannot overcome the thinness of his novels
and lack of substantial argument in some of the essays.
He
invents characters to illustrate a thesis and as a result,
they are seldom lifelike.
They exist to voice his opinions.
Another reason for the lack of complexity in Baldwin's char­
acters is his deterministic philosophy, which he states in
an interview with Mrs. Eckman:
That accident of birth, you know, is really what
controls you in all other things. The only other
102
element in it which is really impenetrable and always
next is who you are. Because everything depends on how
you meet this. Ancf the terrible drama in this, . . . ,
is--according to me--that you never know who you are.
And you begin to discover who you are only in terms of
how you meet it. So that, . . . , the course you follow
is on the one hand charted by things beyond your control,
d'you know--I mean outside you; and it's charted by some­
thing else beyond your control--which is you.^
For example, in Another Country, Rufus blames God for a gratui­
tous malevolence that gave him a black skin.
But Baldwin never
demands that Rufus cl£ anything to live with the reality of his
existence.
His characters are obsessed with the injustice of
man's suffering and with the thought of death.
A note of
doom pervades even the simplest incidents.
Baldwin has been sharply criticized for the lack of
humor in his writing.
R. W. B. Lewis says,
To laugh is to assert the human. What Hawthorne called
"the tragic power of laughter" has been affectively ab­
sent from Baldwin's recent declarations, as well as from
his fiction and his dramatic work.^4
Anthony West made a similar comment as early as 1953.
When one compares Go Tell It On The Mountain with Ralph
Ellison's Invisible Man, tKcT deficiency immediately
declares itself. Ellison's novel was emotionally dis­
turbing and extremely serious, but it was also rich in
comic invention. It made its points with the same sort
of broad farce effects that Dostoevski used time and
time again, and that any novelist who aspires to be
serious must use to give a rounded picture of being a
man. A Harlem without laughter is . . . incredible.
Mr. Baldwin's novel is humorless, and the result is
that it seems not more dignified or more understanding
but less penetrating.5
Early in his career, Baldwin denounced the type of
protest writing found in the works of Richard Wright and
103
Harriet Beecher Stowe.
But his own works contain the same
flaws he once so vigorously condemned:
the perpetuation of
myths which rob the Negro of his humanity; the use of sen­
timentality; and over-simplification of character and theme.
However, these matters do not seem to trouble Baldwin today.
On a trip to the South in 1957, he began to acquire a racial
pride in being a Negro.
As he changed, he also acquired a
new view of his role as a writer.
He says:
Your role was, it seemed to me was to speak for people
who cannot speak. To make it real. To force it on the
world’s attention.6 (Italics mine).
With these goals to meet, Baldwin will fill the role of a
reporter, a journalist, but not an artist.
The autobiographical candor of his writings, his em­
phasis upon the most degraded, debased life of Harlem and the
Village, and the vindictive role of hatred in his latest works
are a source of shock and shame to those Negro intellectuals
whose approval he once sought.
Langston Hughes says:
As an essayist he is thought-provoking, tantalizing,
irritating, abusing, and amusing, and he uses words as
seas do waves, to float and beat, advance and retreat,
rise and take a bow in disappearing.
Few American writers handle words more effectively
in the essay form than James Baldwin. He is much better
at provoking thought in an essay than he is in arousing
emotion in fiction.
I much prefer Notes of a Native Son
to his novel Go Tell It On The Mountain where the surface
excellence and poetry of~Tiis writing did not seem to me
to suit the earthiness of his subject matter.7
Albert Murray, Negro author and critic, says:
Polemics, however are not likely to be epics. They are
likely to be pamphlets, even when they are disguised as
104
stories and plays. Thus, ironically enough, Baldwin’s
historical role in the civil-rights struggle has also
been all but indistinguishable from the one played by
Harriet Beecher Stowe in the Civil War. And with some
of the same exasperating confusion. For, in spite of
what he once declared about raging near paranoiac novels
of oppression actually reinforcing the principles which
activate the conditions they decry, he himself has found
it expedient to degrade United States Negro life to the
level of the subhuman in the very process of pleading
his humanity--something he once said one had only to
accept.8
J. Saunders Redding, Negro teacher and scholar, who praised
Baldwin's first novel so highly, now reprimands Baldwin for
failing to picture the Negro accurately and honestly, es­
pecially in Another Country.
His Negro characters are unmotivated and unexplained;
indeed, finally inexplicable, on the assumption that
their motives are out of the reach of human logic and
that, moreover, their motives are unimportant and not
worth gaining access to.
As a novelist, Baldwin functions within the white
man’s s structure of thought and myth, and in this he
is arrantly dishonest, and not least of all with him­
self .
As an essayist, though, he has integrity.
It is true
that there is one notable exception in his condescendence
to Richard Wright in "Alas, Poor Richard!” and probably
another in The Fire Next Time (1963), parts of which arc
overwrought emotional and intellectual shams.9
On the other hand, the younger intellectuals defend Baldwin
and now openly condemn the Negro intellectuals who accept the
literary standard of the white intellectuals.
Ernest Kaiser,
a contributing editor of Freedomways, denounces Ralph Ellison:
Ellison has become an Establishment writer, an Uncle
Tom, an attacker of the sociological formulations of the
civil rights movement, a defender of the criminal Viet­
nam war of extermination against the Asian (and American
Negro) people, a denigrator of the great tradition of
105
Negro protest writing, and worst of all for himself as
a creative artist, a writer of weak and ineffectual
fiction and essays mostly about himself and how he
became an artist.1°
Baldwin defends the Negro people today and is no longer
running with this pack of white critics.H
This is the ideological situation in the United States
in which the Establishment writers try to whip all
intellectuals into conforming to the dominant views of ^
the white military-industrial-political power structure.
Baldwin's future as a writer is difficult to predict.
Although he is highly talented, his work has not shown the
artistic and literary merit achieved by Ralph Ellison in
Invisible Man.
Other factors which tend to impede the develop­
ment of a writer like Baldwin are noted by Albert Murray in
this succinct statement:
These white friends of the Negro, that is to say,
friends and friends-in-print of Negro Causes, or is it
the Negro Cause?, are very sincere in many ways, and
they have done much good in some ways but they have also
done and continue to do untold harm in a number of perhaps
unrecognized but very fundamental ways. They encourage
inferior standards and values by accepting or pretending
to accept shoddy and immature workmanship. They sanction
inadequate education by going along with what they know
is intellectual rubbish and aesthetic nonsense, if they
know anything. And, furthermore, only the most snobbish
and self-indulgent condescension would permit them to
tolerate so much arrogant stupidity and subversive
irresponsibility.13
John W. Aldridge voices a similar opinion in his latest book
Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis.
In Baldwin's case-- . . . --it is his opinions that re­
ceive the important publicity and not his novel. A
socially controversial and polemical book like The Fire
Next Time has an impact far greater than any novel oT
his would be likely to have; and this is bound to be so,
not only because Baldwin's opinions continue to seem more
106
interesting than his novels, but simply because we live
in that kind of age. Obviously there is nothing wrong
on the face of it with being best known for one’s opin­
ions, and certainly Mr. Baldwin's have the greatest
social and moral significance. But opinions, to para­
phrase Gertrude Stein, are not literature, nor is a
polemical reputation a literary reputation. The two
simply must not be confused.
Yet the point is that they are being confused and
quite openly and cynically. A writer like Baldwin . . .
is given attention as_ if_ his creative work were not only
widely known but widely respected, as if, in fact, his
public standing actually were the logical and product
of the excellence of his creative work rather than the
bastard offshoot of his personal eccentricities, the
color of his skin, or the distinguished company he man­
ages to keep in or out of print.
It is therefore not so very surprising that there
should be young one--or two--book writers today who seem
to feel no particular obligation to settle down to their
proper business of writing more books, since they al­
ready enjoy most of the advantages of having them without
having had to.
It is not surprising if one remembers-as one persistently must remember--that what we are
dealing with here is actually not a literary world at
all, but a publicity and celebrity world, in which the
writer simply as personality or public phenomenon can
achieve, if he is lucky, a status comparable in kind,
if not in scope, to that of movie stars and political
figures, but in which his status may have little or
nothing to do with his contribution to literature.*-**
At the present time, Baldwin is living in Istanbul,
Turkey, where he is working on a novel and two plays.
An ex­
cerpt from his next novel entitled Tell Me How Long The Train1s
Been Gone, appeared in the February, 1967, issue of McCalls.
The excerpt seems to be a replica of what he has written be­
fore, with one exception, that the characters arc V/est Indian
Negroes.
Baldwin cannot fail to know that he has reached a
crucial period in his career as a writer.
Theodore Gross best
summarizes Baldwin's situation in these words:
107
The boy who had to leave Harlem so that he could
write Go Tell It On The Mountain has traveled a long
journey from tKat very protestant, very religious youth:
he stands alone now, defiant, dependent on no larger
force than himself, glorying in those sensual adventures
that affirm and respect "the force of life," maintaining
the close awareness of death, insisting upon his equal
existence as a Negro; and he defies us, his audience,
into the same self-awareness. Talent of his order is
so rare today in America that one fears that he will
make a martyr of his gifts--sell them to an audience
more eager to hear bombast than disciplined reason.
Very early in his career Baldwin claimed that he wanted
to be "an honest man and a good writer"; in his case,
the two ideal states are inextricable; and the way of
the prophet and literary priest, of the "hero" who speaks
apocalyptically for his race, is the ultimate way of
dishones ty.15
108
FOOTNOTES
INTRODUCTION
^Wallace Graves, "The Question of Moral Energy in
James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain," C. L. A. Journal,
VII(March, 1964), p7TT5.
CHAPTER I
^James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. 1.
2
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 191.
8John W. Aldridge, After the Lost Generation (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1951), p. 90.
^John W. Aldridge, In Search of Heresy (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1956), p. 120.
^Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America (Rev. ed.;
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 253.
kjohn A. Williams, "Problems of the Negro Writer,"
Saturday Review, XLVI (April 20, 1963), pp. 21, 40.
^LcRoi Jones, "Problems of the Negro Writer," Saturday
Review, XLVI (April 20, 1963), p. 20.
8Ibid., pp. 20-21.
^Langston Hughes, "Problems of the Negro Writer," Saturday Review, XLVI (April 20, 1963), p. 19.
1-Ojames Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. xi.
Dell
l^Ibid., p. 3.
l^Jamcs Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Books, Inc., 1964), p. 4.
Bantam
109
13James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Go., Inc., 1962), p. 185.
14
Ibid., p. xii.
Dell
15James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. 81.
16Ibid., p. 3.
17Ibid., p. 3.
I8 Ibid., pp. 3-4.
I9Ibid., p. 14.
20Ibid., pp. 4-5.
21Ibid., p. 25.
22Ibid., p. 10.
23Ibid., pp. 27-28.
29Ibid., p. 17.
25ibid., p. 6.
CHAPTER II
^•James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), pp. 15-16.
2F. W. Dupee, King of the Cats (New York:
Straus and Giroux, 1965), p. 208.
Farrar,
8James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. 19.
^Jamcs Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. xii.
3jamcs Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. 4.
^Ibid. , p. 4.
110
7James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 10.
Dell
8Ibid., p. 5.
9James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc. , 1964), p. 4.
10Ibid., p. 94.
11Ibid., p. 95.
12Ibid., p. 95.
13Ibid., p. 138.
14Ibid., p. 139.
l5James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), p. 37.
Dell
16Ibid., p. 38.
17Ibid., p. *+*+.
18
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. l+.
Dell
^James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 196*+), p. 6.
20Ibid., p. 30.
2^Ibid. , p. l*+0.
^3Ibid., p. 30.
23James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 135.
Dell
2UIbid., p. 77.
23Ibid., p. 116.
^James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 196*+), p. 129.
Dell
27James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 196*+), p. 33.
111
28Ibid., p. 19.
29Ibid., p. 56.
30James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 217.
31James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), p. 136.
Dell
Dell
32
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. l6.
33Ibid., p. 54.
3Z+Ibid., p. 54.
33James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), p. 67.
Dell
O / -
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 77.
37James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), p. 36.
Dell
Dell
38 Ibid., p. 129.
39james Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 65.
Dell
40Ibid., p. 112.
^James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. 6l.
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows MY Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 79.
Dell
43Ibid., p. 133.
^James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. l9.
45Ibid., p. 20.
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 134.
h l Ibid., p. 204.
Dell
112
48Ibid., p. 205.
49James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. 18.
50Ibid., p. 49.
51James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), pp. 58-59.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York:
2
5
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), p. 118.
Dell
Dell
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
3
5
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. 140
54Ibid., p. 140.
55Ibid., p. 145.
56James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), p. 130.
Dell
■^Marcus Klein, After Alienation (Cleveland: The
World Publishing Company, 1964), p. 160.
CO
Dachine Rainer, "Rage Into Order," Commonweal,
LXIII, No. 15 (January 13, 1956), p. 385.
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. 19.
^Jamcs Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 3.
61james Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), p. 98.
Dell
Dell
62Ibid. , p. 97.
63james Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 137.
Dell
^James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dell
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), p. 19.
f) s
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell
Publishing Co., 1962), p. 152.
113
^James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), p. 1U1.
Dell
67Ibid., p. 64.
^8F. W. Dupee, King of the Cats (New York:
Straus and Giroux, 1965), p. 212.
Farrar.
70Ibid., p. 113.
7LIbid., p. 119.
72Ibid., p. 103.
73Ibid., p. 101.
74
Nick Aaron Ford, "Search for Identity," Phylon
XXIII, No. 2 (1962), p. 130.
73James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 90.
Dell
7^Nick Aaron Ford, "Search for Identity," Phylon
XXIII, No. 2 (1962), p. 130.
77James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 217.
Dell
78Ibid., p. 188.
79Ibid., p. 215.
80Ibid., pp. 108-109.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), p. 45.
Dell
82Ibid., p. 105.
85
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. 18.
84
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dell
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), pp. 60-61.
8 5James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), pp. 3-4.
114
CHAPTER III
Undocumented quotations are drawn from the story being
d iscussed.
^James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 196*0, pp. 4-5.
^Commentary, VI (October, 1948), p. 334.
3
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. 58.
4
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), p. 134.
Dell
^Commentary, IX (March, 1950), p. 257.
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), pp. 83-86.
7Ibid., p. 18.
O
#
Marcus Klein, After Alienation (Cleveland:
Publishing Company, 1964), pp. 172-173.
The World
9James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), pp. 83-9/.
Dell
10Ibid., p. 108.
^Ibid., p. 215.
l2John V. Hagopian, ’’James Baldwin: The Black and the
Red-White-And-Blue," C. L. A. Journal, VII, No. 2 (December,
1963), p. 134.
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), pp. 3-12.
Dell
l^James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), pp. 99-104.
l^Ibid., pp. 105-116.
l^Mark Schorer, "Technique As Discovery," Essays in
Modern Literary Criticism, ed. Ray B. West, Jr. (New Yorlc:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. 192.
l7James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. 6.
115
CHAPTER IV
Undocumented quotations are drawn from the novel being
discussed.
^-Walter Allen, The Modern Novel in Britain and the
United States (New York: E. P. Dutton Co., Inc. , 1064),
P: -3 2 1 .
o
Steven Marcus, "The American Negro in Search of
Identity," Commentary, XVI, No. 5 (November, 1953), p. 456.
3Irving Howe, A World More Attractive (New York:
Horizon Press, 1963), p. 110.
^George E. Kent, "Baldwin and the Problem of Being,”
C. L. A. Journal, VII, No. 3 (March, 1964), p. 204.
3John Henry Raleigh, "Messages and Sagas," New Republic,
CXXVIII (June 22, 1953), p. 21.
^J. Saunders Redding, "Sensitive Portrait of a Lonely
Boy," New York Herald Tribune Book Review (May 17, 1953), p. 5.
^Anthony West, "Sorry Lives," New Yorker, XXIX (June 20,
1953), p. 85.
^Wallace Graves, "The Question of Moral Energy in James
Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain," C. L. A. Journal, VII,
No. 3 (MarcFT, 1964), p. 2l5.
^James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Books, Inc., 1964), pp. 71-95.
^■°James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), pp. 27-60.
Dell
■^Ibid., p. 44.
■^Ibid., p. 48.
13Ibid., p. 42.
l^James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964), p. 54.
15Ibid., p. 54.
Bantam
116
16Steven Marcus, "The American Negro in Search of
Identity," Commentary, XVI, No. 5 (November, 1953), p. 463.
17James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962), pp. I55-162.
Dell
18Ibid. , p. 162.
l^Ibid., p. 162.
20Ibid., pp. 160-161.
21 Fern Marja Eckman, The Furious Passage of James
Baldwin (New York: M. Evans & Company, Inc., 1966), p. 135.
22Ibid. , p. 31.
23Ibid., p. 31.
2i*Ibid. , p. 32.
25ibid., p. 33.
2^Ibid., p. 32.
27Ibid., p. 32.
28Ibid., p. 133.
29Ibid., p. 133.
80Ibid. , p. 136.
31Irving Howe, A World More Attractive (New York:
Horizon Press, 1963), p. 111.
32Robcrt A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America (Rev. cd.;
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 228-229.
33Jamcs Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1964), p. 62.
Dell
3UIbid., p. 120.
Fern Maria Eckman, The Furious Passage of James Baldwin
(New York: M. Evans & Company, Inc., 1966), pp. 31-32.
36 Ibid., p. 165.
87John S. Lash, "Baldwin Beside Himself: A Study in Modern
Phallicism," C. L. A. Journal, VIII, No. 2 (December, 1964),
p. 133.
117
CHAPTER V
Undocumented quotations are drawn from the play being
discussed.
^■John McCartcn, "Tabernacle Blues," The New Yorker,
XLI, No. 10 (April 24, 1965), p. 85.
o
Ivan Morris, "Vogue's Notebook:
No. 10 (June, 1965), p. 68.
Theatre," Vogue, CXLV,
^Lawrence E. Lucas, "The Amen Corner: Play of the Month,"
The Catholic World, CCI, No. 1203 (June, 1965), pp. 215-216.
uIbid., p. 216.
^Fern Marja Eckman, The Furious Passage of James
Baldwin (New York: M. Evans & Company, Inc., 1966), p. 148.
6Ibid. , p. 232.
^Gregor Roy, "Review of Blues for Mister Charlie," The
Catholic World, CXCIX (July, 1964), pp. 263-264.
O
'Waters E. Turpin, "Contemporary American Negro Play­
wright," C. L. A. Journal, IX, No. 1 (September, 1965), p. 21.
^Allan, Lewis, American Plays and Playwrights of the
Contemporary Theatre (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1965),
~ 2 5 5 . ---10Ibid., p. 256.
H-David Littlejohn, Black on White: A Critical Study of
Writing by American Negroes (New York: Grossman Publishers,
T9F6), p. 7 X --------12 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York:
Noonday Press, 1966), p. 151.
The
^Ibid., p. 152.
14Ibid., pp. 153-154.
l^Fern Marja Eckman, The Furious Passage of James
Baldwin (New York: M. Evans & Company, Inc., 1.566), p. 232.
16Ibid. , p. 232.
118
CHAPTER VI
^-James Baldwin, Another Country (New York:
Publishing Co., Inc., 1963), p. 295.
Dell
^Raymond Schroth, S. J., "James Baldwin's Search,"
The Catholic World CXCVIII, No. 1187 (February, 1969), p. 293.
^Fern Marja Eckman, The Furious Passage of James
Baldwin (New York: M. Evans & Company, Inc., 1966), p. 199.
^R. W. B. Lewis, Trials of the Word: Essays in American
Literature and the Humanistic Tradition (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1965), p. 191.
^Anthony West, "Sorry Lives,” New Yorker, XXIX, No. 18
(June 20, 1953), p. 85.
^Fcrn Marja Eckman, The Furious Passage of James
Baldwin (New York: M. Evans & Company, Inc., 1966), p. 196.
^Langston Hughes, "From Harlem to Paris," New York
Times Book Review (February 26, 1956), p. 26.
^Albert Murray, "Something Different, Something New,"
Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, ed.
Herbert Hill (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966),
pp. 118-119.
9j. Saunders Redding, "Since Richard Wright," African
Forum, I (Spring, 1966), p. 23.
l°Ernest Kaiser, "Negro Images in American Writing,"
Freedomways, VII (Spring, 1967), p. 157.
H-Ibid. , p. 155.
■^Ibid. , p. 163.
^Albert Murray, "Something Different, Something New,"
Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, ed.
Herbert Hill (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966),
p. 126.
l^John W. Aldridge, Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis (New York: David McKay Company, Inc.,
1966), pp. 73-79.
^Theodore Gross, "The World of James Baldwin," Critique
VII, No. 2 (Winter, 1969-65), p. 199.
119
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I.
WORKS BY JAMES BALDWIN (discussed in this thesis).
Collected Essays
Notes of a Native Son.
Nobody Knows My Name.
----- 1 9 v r .---The Fire Next Time.
New York:
New York:
New York:
Bantam Books, Inc., 1964.
Dell Publishing Co., Inc.,
Dell Publishing Co. , Inc. , 196*+.
Short Stories
"Previous Condition," Commentary, VI (October, 1948), 334-342.
"The Death of the Prophet," Commentary, IX (March, 1950),
257-261.
"Sonny's Blues," Partisan Review, XXIV (Summer, 1957), 327-358.
"Come Out the Wilderness," Mademoiselle, XLVI (March, 1958),
102-104, 146-154.
"This Morning, This Evening, So Soon," Atlantic, CCVI
(September, 1960), 34-52.
Novels
Go Tell It On The Mountain.
Library, 1954.
New York:
The New American
Giovanni's Room.
New York:
Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1964.
Another Country.
New York:
Dell Publishing Co. , Inc., 1963.
120
Plays
"The Amen Corner," Zero, II (July, 195*0, *4-8, 11-13,
Blues For Mister Charlie.
Inc. , 196*4.
II.
New York:
jj\ct I,"]
Dell Publishing Co.,
WORKS ABOUT BALDWIN
Books
Aldridge, John W. In Search of Heresy.
Hill Book Company, Inc., 1956.
. After The Lost Generation.
Book Company, Inc., 1951.
New York:
New York:
McGraw-
McGraw-Hill
. Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel
in Crisis. New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1966.
Allen, Walter. The Modern Novel in Britain and the United
States. New York: E. P. Dutton Co., Inc., 196*4.
Bone, Robert A.
New Haven:
The Negro Novel in America.
Revised edition.
Yale University Press, 1965.
Dupee, F. W . The King of the Cats.
and Giroux, 1965.
New York:
Farrar, Straus
Eckman, Fern Marja. The Furious Passage of James Baldwin.
York: M. Evans & Company, Inc. , 1961a.
Howe, Irving. A World More Attractive.
Press, 1963.
New York:
Horizon
Klein, Marcus. After Alienation: American Novels in MidCentury. Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 196*4.
Lewis, Allan. American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.,
1965.
Lewis, R. W. B. Trials of the Word:
Essays in American
Literature and the Humanistic Tradition.
New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1965.
New
121
Littlejohn, David. Black on White: A Critical Survey of
Writing by American Negroes. New York: Grossman
Publishers, 1966.
Murray, Albert. ’’Something Different, Something New," Anger
and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, ed.
Herbert Hill. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966,
pp. 114-135.
Schorer, Mark. "Technique As Discovery," Essays in Modern
Literary Criticism, ed. Ray B. West, Jr. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961. Pp. 189-205.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation.
Noonday Press, 1966.
New York:
The
Articles and Periodicals
Commentary, VI (October, 1948), 334.
Commentary, IX (March, 1950), 257.
Ford, Nick Aaron. "Search for Identity: A Critical Survey
of Significant Belles-Lettres by and about Negroes Pub­
lished in 1961," Phylon, XXIII (1962), 128-130.
Graves, Wallace. "The Question of Moral Energy in James
Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain," C. L. A. Journal,
VII (March, V K ftJ ,~ J l'5 ^ 2 'T 5 7
Gross, Theodore, "The World of James Baldwin," Critique,
VII, No. 2 (Winter, 1964-65), 139-149.
Hagopian, John V. "James Baldwin: The Black and the RedWhite-And-Blue," C. L. A. Journal, VII, No. 2 (December,
1963), 133-140.
Hughes, Langston.
"From Harlem to Paris," New York Times
Book Review (February 26, 1956), 26.
Hughes, Langston.
"Problems of the Negro Writer," Saturday
Review, XLVI, No. 16 (April 20, 1963), 19-20.
Jones, Lc Roi. "Problems of the Negro Writer," Saturday
Review, XLVI, No. 16 (April 20, 1963), 20-21.
122
Kaiser, Ernest. "Negro Images in American Writing,"
Freedomways, VII, No. 2 (Spring, 1967), 152-163.
Kent, George E. "Baldwin and the Problem of Being," C. L. A.
Journal, VII, No. 3 (March, 1964), 202-214.
Lash, John S. "Baldwin Beside Himself: A Study in Modern
Phallicism," C. L. A. Journal, VIII, No. 2 (December,
1964), 132-140.
Lucas, Lawrence E. "The Amen Corner," The Catholic World,
CCI, No. 1203 (June, 1965), 215-2167"
McCarten, John. "Tabernacle Blues," The New Yorker, XLI,
No. 10 (April 24, 1965), 85.
Marcus, Steven. "Three Novelists in Search of Identity,"
Commentary, XVI, No. 5 (November, 1953), 456-463.
Morris, Ivan. "The Amen Corner," Vogue, CXLV, No. 10 (June,
1965), 68.
Rainer, Dachine. "Rage Into Order," Commonweal, LXIII, No. 15
(January 13, 1956), 384-386.
Raleigh, John Henry. "Messages and Sagas," New Republic,
CXXVIII, No. 25 (June 22, 1953), 21.
Redding, J. Saunders. "Sensitive Portrait of a Lonely Boy,"
New York Herald Tribune Book Review (May 17, 1953), 5.
Redding, J. Saunders. "Since Richard Wright," African Forum,
I, No. 4 (Spring, 1966), 21-31.
Roy, Gregor. "Review of Blues For Mister Charlie," The
Catholic World, CXCIX, No. 1 (July, 1964), 192, T 6 3 - 264.
Schroth, S. J., Raymond A. "James Baldwin's Search," The
Catholic World, CXCVIII (February, 1964), 288-294.
Turpin, Waters E. "Contemporary American Playwright,"
C. L. A. Journal, IX, No. 1 (September, 1965), 12-24.
West, Anthony. "Sorry Lives," The New Yorker, XXIX, No. 18
(June 20, 1953), 85.
Williams, John A. "Problems of the Negro Writer," Saturday
Review, XLVI, No. 16 (April 20, 1963), 21, 40.
123
III.
GENERAL REFERENCES
Books
Aldridge, John W. , (ed.). Critiques and Essays on Modern
Fiction. New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1952.
Balakian, Nona, and Simmons, Charles (eds.). The Creative
Present: Notes on Contemporary American Fiction. New
York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1963.
Baumbach, Jonathan. The Landscape of Nightmare:
the Contemporary American Novel. New York:
University Press, 1965.
Studies in
New York
Brown, Francis, (ed.). Opinions and Perspectives from the
New York Times Book Review. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1964.
Brustein, Robert. "Why American Plays Are Not Literature,"
Writing in America, eds. John Fischer and Robert B.
Silvers. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University
Press, 1960. Pp. 46-60.
Burgum, Edwin Berry. The Novel and the World’s Dilemma.
York: Oxford University Press, 1947.
Eisingcr, Chester E. Fiction of the Forties.
University of Chicago Press, 1964.
Ellison, Ralph.
Shadow and Act.
Fiedler, Leslie A.
1960.
Noi
New York:
in Thunder.
. Waiting for the End.
Publishers, 1964.
Gassner, John. Theatre at the Crossroads.
Rinehart and Winston, 1960.
Chicago:
Random House, 1964.
Boston:
New York:
New
Beacon Press,
Stein and Day,
New York:
Holt,
Gross, Seymour L., and Hardy, John Edward (eds.).
Images of
the Negro in American Literature. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1966.
Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American
Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961.
124
Hoffman, Frederick J. Freudianism and the Literary Mind.
Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1945.
Jung, C. S. The Undiscovered Self.
Company, 1957.
Kazin, Alfred. Contemporaries.
Company, 1962.
Boston:
Boston:
Little, Brown &
Little, Brown &
Ludwig, Jack. Recent American Novelists. University of
Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 22.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962.
Mizener, Arthur. The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.
Moore, Harry T. (ed.). Contemporary American Novelists.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964.
Mphahlele, Ezekiel. The African Image.
A. Praeger, Publisher, 1962.
New York:
Frederick
Podhoretz, Norman. Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and
After in American Writing. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1964.
Rahv, Philip. The Myth and the Powerhouse: Essays on
Literature and Ideas. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1965.
Ruitenbeck, Hendrik M. (ed.). Psychoanalysis and Literature.
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1964.
Thorp, Willard. American Writing in the Twentieth Century.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, I960.
Articles and Periodicals
Balliett, Whitney. "Review of Another Country,” New Yorker,
XXXVIII (August 4, 1962), 69-70.
Barksdale, Richard K. "Alienation and the Anti-Hero in Recent
American Fiction," C. L. A. Journal, X (September. 1966).
1-10.
Brown, Sterling A. "A Century of Negro Portraiture," The
Massachusetts Review, VII, No. 1 (Winter, 1966), 73-96.
125
Brustein, Robert. "Everybody’s Protest Play," The New
Republic, CL, No. 20 (May 16, 1964), 35-37.
Cassidy, T. E. "The Long Struggle," Commonweal, LVIII,
No. 7 (May 22, 1953), 186.
Clurman, Harold. "Blues for Mr. Charlie," The Nation,
CXCVIII, No. 20 (May 11, 1964), 495-49^7“
Cohen, Nathan. "A Flawed Talent," National Review, XVI,
No. 36 (September 8, 1964), 780-781.
Ebony, XIX (June, 1964), 188-193.
Elkoff, Marvin. "Everybody Knows His Name," Esquire, LXII
(August, 1964), 59-64, 120-123.
Ellison, Ralph.
"Harlem is Nowhere," Harper's Magazine, IX
(August, 1964), 53-57.
Esty, William.
New Republic, CXXXV (December 17, 1956), 26.
Foote, Dorothy Norris.
"James Baldwin's 'Holler Books,'" The
CEA Critic, XXV (May, 1963), 10-16.
. "The Truth of Fiction," The CEA Critic, XXVI (May,
"T964), 8-9.
Ford, Nick Aaron. "Walls Do Not a Prison Make: A Critical
Survey of Significant Belles-Lettres By and About Negroes
Published in 1962," Phylon, XXIV, No. 2 (1963), 123.
Gayle, Jr., Addison.
"A Defense of James Baldwin," C. L. A.
Journal, X, No. 3 (March, 1967), 201-208.
Kaplan, Donald M. "Homosexuality and American Theatre: A
Psychoanalytic Comment," Tulane Drama Review, IX, No. 3
(Spring, 1965), 25-55.
Karp, David. "A Squalid World," Saturday Review, XXXIX
(Dec. 1, 1956), 34.
Lewis, Theophilus. "Review of Blues For Mister Charlie,"
America, CX, No. 22 (May 30, 1964),776-777.
Maclnnes, Colin. "Dark Angel: The Writings of James Baldwin,"
Encounter (London), XXI, No. 1 (July, 1963), 22-33.
Newman, Charles.
"The Lesson of the Master: Henry James and
James Baldwin," The Yale Review, LVI, No. 1 (October,
1966), 45-59.
126
Nichols, Charles H. "The New Calvinism,” Commentary, XXIII
(January, 1957), 94-96.
O'Daniel, Thurman. "James Baldwin: An Interpretative Study,"
C. L. Journal, VII, No. 1 (September, 1963), 37-47.
Rogoff, Gordon. "Muddy Blues," Commonweal, LXXX, No. 10
(May 29, 1964), 299-300.
Sheed, Wilfrid. "Amen, Amen," Commonweal, LXXXII, No. 7
(May 7, 1965), 221-222.
Silberman, Charles Eliot. "Some Little Known Truths About
the American Negro Scene," Columbia College Today,
XII, No. 1 (Fall, 1964), 26^317
Steinen, Gloria. "James Baldwin, An Original: A Sharpened
View of Him," Vogue, CXXXXIV (July, 1964), 78-79, 129,
138.
Thclwell, Mike. "James Baldwin: Native Alien," Motive
Magazine, XXIV (May, 1964), 10-15.
West, Anthony. "Review of Giovanni's Room," New Yorker,
XXXII (November 10, 1956), 204-203: