Word: baldwinism
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Despite his credentials as an outsider, James Baldwin has been a middleman between black rights activists and white liberals. Finely written early novels like Go Tell It on the Mountain sensitized white readers to life under black skin. The moral essays (Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time) personalized the abstractions of racism with passion and high intelligence. Yet a middleman runs the risk of being caught between both ends. Liberals eventually tired of having their noses rubbed in their own hypocrisy. Radical brothers like Eldridge Cleaver charged Baldwin with caring more about personal needs than black liberation. Indeed...
...Baldwin seems particularly aware of his vulnerability in No Name in the Street, a collection of reminiscences raked from his private disasters and public disappointments. The book is walled in by a profound disillusion based partly on the state of the world as Baldwin sees it and partly on the unchangeable fact that Baldwin is now nearly 48 years old. "What in the world was I now," he laments, "but an aging, lonely, sexually dubious, politically outrageous, unspeakable erratic freak...
Funeral Suit. He then goes on to prove it. An old friend calls with a grotesque request. He has read in a gossip column that Baldwin never again will wear the suit he wore at Martin Luther King's funeral. The friend, a postal clerk, wants to know if he could have the suit. Baldwin takes it to him and stays for dinner. A few drinks, an attempt by the friend to defend U.S. Indochina policy, and Baldwin explodes in violent profanity before the man and his family. There is also Baldwin torn between directing the legal defense...
...Baldwin seems to have an instinct for no-win situations. It is almost as if he needed them to fulfill a larger need for his incessant self-examinations, which often turn out to be self-deprecations. In recalling his youthful days as an expatriate in Paris, Baldwin man ages to equate his attitude toward persecuted Algerians with the attitude of white Americans toward their black countrymen. His feeling of kinship with the Algerian cause was accompanied by the troubling fact that his American passport granted him special privileges...
...Baldwin consistently main-lines on guilt, whose source appears to be an un reasonable sense of inadequacy. He seems truly tortured by the world as it is and by his inability as an artist to change it. The healing Christian love, so strongly preached in the earlier writings, proved inadequate but remains as a rhetorical echo. The righteous, cleansing fire he summoned for "next time" is now only a vague and sinister "shape of the wrath to come." He talks of morality as a living thing, but he is crushed by the truth that the struggle for political freedom...