Guardian, June 20, 1974. p.9

‘Love and History’, Christopher Bigsby

Bigsby reviews If Beal Street Could Talk:

‘In a television interview some years ago Baldwin told James Mossman, “I believe in love…I believe we can save each other.” It was a confession of faith which does much to explain his life no less than his work and which goes to the heart of Baldwin’s strengths and deficiencies as a writer. NP: At its worst, such a conviction has frequently betrayed him into a painful and disabling sentimentality, a simplification of experience as potentially dangerous as the concrete realities which are thereby evaded. At its best it has stood as the only force which could sustain him against the insistent logic of racial history which he has repeatedly felt obliged to direct like a dagger at the heart of America. It was the tension between these two themes which for so long made his work resonate with the hopes and fears of a generation. That it no longer does so is perhaps our tragedy as well as his own’.