Going to Meet the Man James Baldwin Review

Dec 12, 1965

Going To Run across The Man

By STANLEY KAUFFMAN

GOING TO Meet THE MAN By James Baldwin.

ames Baldwin'south collection of short stories invites little new annotate because information technology contains piddling new piece of work. Of eight stories, five were published betwixt 1948 and 1960, and none of the others was, I hope, written subsequently. The offset two stories, "The Rockpile" and "The Outing," seem to be sketches for his start novel, "Go Tell Information technology on the Mountain," published in 1953. Freshness from the mint is no test of quality, but neither is quality provided by scraping the past in response to an author's present popularity.

It is widely held that Baldwin's all-time piece of work is done in nonfiction. His exceptional polemic gifts equally author and as speaker in the civil rights movement take helped to fix that view relatively swiftly. That this view is simply, that Baldwin is non the ironic artist-victim of the social-political movement in which he is fiercely engaged, is demonstrated again in this volume.

Let usa look starting time at the chemical element that strikes the reader first: the prose. It is crusted with clichÈ. From the very starting time paragraph: "Roy felt it to be his right, not to say his duty, to play there."

A glimpse of a barmaid: "When she smiled one saw the lilliputian daughter, ane sensed the doomed, however- struggling woman beneath the dilapidated face of the semi-whore."

A description of jazz: "Creole began to tell us what the dejection were all about. They were not about anything new. He and his boys upward there were keeping it new, at the take chances of ruin, destruction, madness and death, in social club to find new ways to make the states listen."

The triteness of the writing indicates a regard for his prose that is different from that for his essay prose. Would he, in an essay, call a cigarette a "sublimatory tube"? If it is asserted that this is early on work and that his fictional prose has improved (which is arguable), then the willingness to publish this book, every bit is, indicates some other divergence of regard. Very petty of this writing shows the incisiveness of prose, the rhythmic control, the attractively serpentine and dramatic structure, the simple intendance, that marking his other writing.

Insofar as the content of fiction can exist distinguished from the writing, when we leave Baldwin's prose in these stores to consider their content, we move from the question of sheer workmanship to that of basic talent. He oft picks a good focus for a story (it is his best fictional gift), which is oft sexual. Saul Bellow wrote of Baldwin's final novel: "All the important questions. . .are translated into sex."

In this collection we accept an American Negro with a white Swedish married woman, a Negro girl with a white lover, a Southern sheriff who is impotent with his wife until he thinks of Negro girls and racial violence. These are all good blueprints for stories. But when the generally leathery prose allows us to ignore its rivets to see what it contains, we detect chunks of material: chosen but not digested, assaulted but not taken; stories that lack the elements of personal truth and personal bamboozlement that motion cloth from concern into fine art.

"Come Out of the Wildnerness" has an excellent position of tension a sensitive Negro girls who lives with a white painter is virtually sentenced to a relationship with her commonplace Negro dominate considering she feels the futility of her liaison. But every bit the story movers to its climax, we are principally conscious of the conventional tapering of the spotlight, narrowing on her for a last emotional solo, of the sob that will inevitably involuntarily escape her throat.

The forcefulness of the subject and the sincerity of the author are swamped in the banalities of method. At that place is not a stroke in the story that is not stock in characterization or mechanically naked. It would exist possible to hypothesize that occasionally Baldwin's intensity of concern paralyzes his art if elsewhere in his book or in his novels and plays i had been sufficiently convinced of his power to assimilate observation and feel and to illuminate them, instead of simply relating them to united states of america in compassionate rate, touched up with literary Freudian veneer.

This inadequacy is underscored in the one story that deals exclusively with white people. "The Human being Kid" is unimpelled by social anguish and unaided (every bit others are) by vividness of milieu. "Equally the sunday began preparing for her leave, and he sensed the waiting night," the reader enters an business relationship of a conflict between 2 farmers seen through the eyes of the viii-twelvemonth-one-time son of one of them, who is eventually murdered by his male parent's friend. The tone of the piece is a throwback to the twenties of O.East. Rolvaag, the stark poetry of the soul that flourished in literary magazines until information technology collapsed in the Depression. This tone seems a refuge for an writer dealing with unfamiliar emotion and surround. The failure of imagination is so thorough that it provides a clear view of the residually small talent in the other stories those cloaked past social urgency and sexual detail.

All the above just supports my opening statement there is picayune new today about Baldwin'due south fiction. His strength and value, then far, are in the world of fact, not of fine art. Speaking of Negro writers, Ralph Ellison said "What moves a author to eloquence is less meaningful than what he makes of it." This was not written specifically of Baldwin, but, in my view, information technology applies to him.

Mr. Kauffman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-going.html

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