Daylight Magazine, May 1964.

'In the Baldwin Country', Lindsay Barrett

Lindsay Barrett is a Jamaican writer now living in Europe. His fourth novel “Leap Skyward” the first to be published, will be bought later this year by Jonathan Cape. As a personal friend of Baldwin — they met in Paris — Lindsay Barrett is particularly well qualified to make this exclusive appraisal of Baldwin’s work.

*Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (Michael Joseph 21s.) Nobody knows my name by James Baldwin (Michael Joseph 21s).

Any discussion of James Baldwin’s work must at the outset be intimidated by the powerful and inherent examination of his soul by his mind which is evident in almost every word he writes. He is a language stylist by natural necessity rather than by conscious training and it is instinctive power rather than technical facility that accounts for his general success. Style in language comes naturally to the Negro as he relates the native feelings of his everyday experience to an alien experience in an alien land where a language, which is at bottom also alien, has been thrust upon him more for his digestion than for his expression. To overcome the initial (and sometimes it seems, eternal) stifling sensation of inarticulate reality that this un-asked for gift forces on him, the Negro employs linguistic field-game tactics, dodging and dancing around the direct centre of his immediate thoughts to evolve a style of speech strangely beautiful, but confusing, in the ears of white people, and at the same time strangely and gratingly clear. It is the intent and sentiment that is clear behind the words when a white man hears it and not the words or sentences. Thus that same charm and style that fascinates whites in the blues, shock and outrage and in some cases even frighten them.

The same is true of Baldwin’s essays, and the greatness of his achievement is that the overwhelming power of his style forces whites to admit, however grudgingly, the truth of his sentiments. However, his imaginative power, and indeed the whole range of his artistic relationship to the business of communication is so excessively loaded with the burden of his tendency to underscore impressions, that his most successful creative achievements have been his essays rather than his novels. To discuss these two collections of essays* at this late date is a task that demands to be undertaken in depth and in relation to his novels, if only because the attempts made to do so by white critics here in England have been largely frustrated by the total lack of sympathetic unity and an overpowering and misleading assumption on their part that the finger of accusation points over them, under the, around them, anywhere but at them! The lie in such an assumption is immediately clear to any black man living in this country if he troubles himself (as I do constantly) with confrontations of his existence and position here in relation to the whites who surround him everywhere.

To question his history in relation to contemporary tradition sold to him and claimed for him in the dailies, weeklies and monthly’s, novels, textbooks, TV, radio and cinema of this country, is to be left undoubtedly feeling a great deal closer to Baldwin than one would have thought real at a mere cursory glance. And of course this leaves the English people standing in much the same place as Baldwin’s white people…the Americans; so called because they appropriated the Continent of North America and introduced to its shores and plains the customs and habits of the native countries they have left behind…notably England!

James Baldwin, in his way, is a Negro blues singer, for he chronicles and narrates tales of the mind’s musing, and the soul’s desire and pain, just like a blues singer, using the same method (imagic stance and lyric virtuosity) to do much the same thing. An utterance such as; “To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need”, means nothing more than;

“This old world been a hell to me

Death is in the land.

I’m so glad death is in this land

I’m so glad death is in this land’’.

The only difference is that what Baldwin has attempted to define the blues singer has expressed. There is no real reason why a reviewer should attempt to chronologise and criticise each subject and conclusion that Baldwin examines in these two books, it is the overall achievement that is aimed at and attained. (And he really does examine his conclusions with a constantly analytic ferret type mind so that each essay is a series of stated impressions a kind of chain reaction, the reality of which is constantly checked against the great lie, actual fact.) But to say that Baldwin analyses and defines is to do him a disservice when the words are held to mean what they have so far meant in the [contaxt] of western literary thought. His abilities are not confined to these activities in his essays and in fact he has extended the essay form by bringing into it the qualities that western literary critics have always reserved for the “more creative” forms of the novel, story, and poem. His presentation of fact is involved with his imaginative genius and it is in his language that this is most obvious since the demands of this involvement have led him to exercise freedom rather than control of his style. The result is that where one once expected ideas in the essay, Baldwin has utilised images. This, of course has been, to some extent, dictated by the general area of his experience, the vague and yet real shadow world of Negro existence in America. The impression that this area of experience has left with Baldwin is not very different from the impression that it left on Charlie “Bird” Parker. Baldwin’s mental and linguistic dodging and dancing very often reminds one of nothing so much as the musical and dodging and dancing of “Bird”

playing with a melody in much the same way that Baldwin plays with the paper realities spooned to him through the social hatches, cinema, dailies etc. Bird when he took the music of the Negro forward was also defining his existence and expressing his definition through his horn, which is what Baldwin has done through his essays. Bird and Baldwin are in a funny way contemporaries in the social chronology of Negro tradition in the United States even though Bird is long gone and Baldwin’s public birth did not come until the great musician was already beginning to die.

At the same time the artistic difference between Baldwin and Richard Wright is roughly equivalent to that between Bird and Louis Armstrong and is really a similarity, and the traditional chronology again suggests that both of the older men belong to the same period in the mind although Richard Wright too is long gone and Louis Armstrong is still alive, and the public birth of Wright came when Armstrong was already a famous man. But although this parallel is to my mind quite infallible, Baldwin, armed with words instead of a saxophone, is in a much better position to state his knowledge of the difference that is really a similarity than Bird ever was and so we have one remarkable essay in “Notes of A Native Son” in which Baldwin’s definition of the difference is stated. Largely because Baldwin’s method is examination rather than comparison this essay “Many Thousands Gone” has been misconstrued by white critics (and even some black ones whose thought processes have never reacted as violently to the unloading of Western guilt and tradition unto the Negro as Baldwin obviously has) as an attack on Wright. But in the collection this essay comes right after another examination of another book, this time by a white woman, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “that cornerstone of American social protest fiction” and the difference between the two essays is such that a perspective reader cannot fail to see where, in Baldwin country, an attack heads and respectful though thorough, questioning points. Baldwin’s obituary to the late Wright in the second collection of essays corroborates the feeling I had on reading the earlier essay, that there was more love and understanding in his examination of Wright’s “Native son” than there was a rejection of its premises and values. When in the final essay in “Notes…” he says “…ordinary representatives of the Herrenvolk having never felt this rage and being unable to imagine it, quite fail to understand”, he is talking precisely of that rage which Wright’s characters Bigger Thomas was an expression of. And although it seems to me he made the grave mistake of assuming that White America could have better understood that rage and attempt to make amends for the cause of it if Wright had defined it more clearly, such a mistake is understandable in one whose memory of Bigger could be a frightening memory of himself. A terrible foreboding. I for one am prepared to overlook the misconception in Baldwin’s criticism where I would not overlook it in a white critic because the white critic could have no excuse good enough to convince me that Bigger represented any even remotely similar stirrings of hate in the backwaters of his history since in my black eyes his white skin would afford him the kind of protection that at birth rules out an experience of the mind even remotely similar to mine or Baldwin’s or Bigger’s in facing race realities which is what Bigger an oversensitive but inarticulate youth was forced to face by the hour each day from the moment the alarm clock screamed that horrible Briiiiiinnngg!! In his ears. Baldwin, when he examined Bigger Thomas, was examining a danger as real to him as night and day. It must be frightening for anyone to realise that sensitivity born and nurtured in exactly the same environment as theirs can breed, so logically, a murderous environment and suicidal inarticulate rage. Such a realisation sends one out grabbing at hypothetical straws such as the faint possibility of a white understanding that would lead to an easing off of the pressure. But even Baldwin in later essays when the examinations are less personal naturally expresses no faith in that possibility. Now Mrs. Stowe, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is an ordinary representative of the Herrenvolk” and so Baldwin’s endorsement of the rage she could not understand is again an attack on her without meaning to be, and at the same time an endorsement of the imagination experience of the late Wright.

A former store-front Church preacher in Harlem, Baldwin is still a preacher in a way. Moreover he is one whose power is not based so much on religious fervour now as on social direction. As a preacher of the blues he [is] again roughly contemporary in traditional chronology to Charlie Parker who was also a preacher of the blues in his way (and whose Richard Wright, to repeat the chronology, could be Louis Armstrong and Mrs. Stowe could have been Tommy Dorsey) because Parker’s black America and his white America were the same as Baldwin’s (of that there is no doubt) and only their artistic symbols were different because their artistic mediums also were. Thus where Parker was forced by [the] nature of his art to remain within the confines of artistic expression, the bedmate of religious fervour, Baldwin has attempted to embrace and utilise social direction even though in the end he can do no more than Parker did, reaffirm and praise the Negro’s power by saying just how it was. (“That’s where it’s at” is serious terminology and can apply to Baldwin’s utterances just as it applies to intricate Parker flights of fancy). It is because of this that, in the broad survey, Baldwin is not yet the black writer of today. For while his definitions and examinations are welcome as necessary to the complete chronological ordering of the Negro’s cycle of protest and experience he has failed to make that vital return to the expressive sensibility of the broad black experience and to link it with the analytic forces to the soul thus forging an art of rewarding and refreshingly unusual sensory qualities. (It is, of course a sigh, of greatness that at points in both these collections he has signalled this awareness of this failing — which he portrays as an inability — and he has not sought to justify his inability. But then to paraphrase one of his own questions; Who does that help?). It is this failing, to my mind, that has made him  one of the most overrated novelists of the century, although my judgement now is confined to the critical reception of his two later novels rather than to that of his first, “Go Tell It On The Mountain”, a novel that really promised much more in that form than Baldwin has fulfilled in his two later efforts in the field. So it is left to his essays to support the rather heavy weight of his reputation. One the strength of these two collections than may well do the job for a long time to come. But when other Negroes such as Ornette Coleman, another saxophonist, and Leroi Jones, poet and essayist, are at work, Baldwin is in danger (unless he is considering changing drastically what has been the tone of novel writing so far or sticking to his essays in which form he is a real master) of being the Armstrong and Wright of a very imminent tomorrow. However posterity was invented for the preservation of good deaths and if Baldwin’s ideas and attitudes should succumb to the onslaughts of people like Coleman and Jones these two collections of essays will still stand as pillars of style where they crumble as monuments of ideas. This is not to say that as valuable educational pieces they are not exciting and vital even today. In fact they are more so than anything that has come out of American within the last twenty years, with the exception, maybe, of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, because Baldwin’s area of travel although very much the heart and life force of that country has never been (again with the possible exception of Ellison) so well traversed by so native a native son.

C. Lindsay Barrett, London/march ’64.