Jan. 11, 1986: 23

‘A black Blimp’, Colin Welch

Colin Welch reviews The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction.

Welch is often dismissive, mocking and judgmental. He compares Baldwin with Martin Luther King’s position:

“[King informed] his black flock that negroes, ten per cent of the population of St Louis, were responsible for 58 per cent of its crime, he stoutly adjured them to hoist their moral standards, to save money and to stop blaming the white man.)”

In other passages, he is mocking:

“On the back [sleeve] peers forth from modish gloom, like a ravaged dark moon in its second quarter, half of the author’s face, epicene, ‘sensitive’, wounded, anguished, deeply trenches (perhaps in part by beatings from cops and other whites?).”

Of the claim that Baldwin’s writing is driven by rage:

“[Is] it really more flattering than to pronounce his art to be nourished and sustained by prodigious doses of brandy or heroin or even by clinical insanity, all equally destructive of every faculty a writer needs? Is the company of a man unquenchably angry more to be sought than that of a dog with la rage?”

This attitude soon changes, however, and Welch finds much to admire in Baldwin’s essays. It seems, however, that what he is most moved by, is the discovery that many of Baldwin’s positions are traditional – indeed ‘conservative’ – and that they elide ‘radical chic’.

Nevertheless, Welch sees these conservative ‘sentiments’ as a rarity in Baldwin’s writings, which is instead characterised by “great swirling torrents of the religiose radical rhetoric (‘white man, hear me!’) and resentment…” For the rest of the review, Welch mostly denounces what he perceives to be Baldwin’s internal contradictions.