Word: baldwin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN'S BEEN GONE by James Baldwin. 484 pages. Dial...
...other James Baldwin is the questing novelist, the private man loaded down with personal problems that he must defeat-or be defeated by. This is the Baldwin who with his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, marvelously evoked a Harlem boyhood nurtured in a storefront church. It is the Baldwin who, with post-Gide candor, courageously rendered the homosexual experience in his second novel, Giovanni's Room. But this is also the writer who six years ago turned out the deeply disappointing novel, Another Country, a lengthy excursion into the world of bisexuality...
White Sister, Black Cat. This new book is further evidence that as a fictioneer Baldwin is in great danger of becoming drearily irrelevant. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone rambles like a milk train over the same run that Baldwin covered in Another Country, creaks over the same hard ground, sounds the same blast about the Negro's condition, rattles the same rationale for homosexuality: "My terrible need to lie down, to breathe deep, to weep long and loud, to be held in human arms, almost any human arms, to hide my face...
...OWEN BALDWIN Kingston, Mass...
...difficult to justify in a democracy and at an institution where rewards are supposedly on merit. Unlike the groups of early Christians or the cells of the French Resistance, justification derives not from an oppressive outer force but rather from the members' inner needs for exclusivity. As James Baldwin has pointed out, everyone needs his "nigger." We are told by the Choate Club president that secrecy was necessary in order to avoid the anxiety suffered by those who weren't chosen. I suggest rather that secrecy at the Choate Club, in an egalitarian age where restrictive barriers are collapsing...