February 25, 1964 (page 8 of 28).

‘One Laugh, Mr. Baldwin, Would Help’, Malcom Muggeridge

Muggeridge review of Notes of a Native Son & Nobody Knows My Name where he claims both books fail to acknowledge that ‘American Negroes’ are ‘thriving’. Accuses the texts of containing ‘not one single laugh’. Praises JB’s writing on his time in Paris.

‘Segregation seems to be a subject weighted down with its own leaden solemnity. No glimmer of humour irradiates either Dr. Verwoerd or his opposite number, Redeemer Nkrumah: Governor Faubus or Reverend Martin Luther King: the righteously indignant Observer newspaper or the indignantly righteous Empire Loyalists. It might have been hoped that the talented American Negro novelist James Baldwin, would provide an exception. Alas, no. In his two volumes of essays, largely concerned with segregation and related matters, there is not one single laugh’.

‘The American Negroes have not become extinct. One the contrary, they are thriving, and as Mr. Baldwin himself exemplifies, they have become exuberantly American’.

‘Mr. Baldwin’s account of how his nine years’ exile in Paris made him dramatically aware of his inescapable American-ness is one of the best things in the volumes’.