Word: baldwinism
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...easy to evoke for white readers the pace of Harlem life, or to clarify for them the attitude of a man who has emerged from the ghetto. To do so, even before the most sympathetic of audiences, Baldwin must adopt an unfamiliar mode of writing, must continually attempt to find new ways of expressing old thoughts--and then must pray for an intelligent reading and an adaptable audience...
...between Baldwin and his audience by examining the advertisements that surround his prose. On one page, for instance, Baldwin insists that white Americans, equating Europe with "civilization," envied those "more elegant European nations that were still untroubled by the presence of black men on their shores." Yet, he continues, if we are not to share in Europe's decay we must "accept ourselves as we are, bring new life to Western achievements, and perhaps transform them." Then this phase of the argument reaches a climax...
...left of Baldwin's piece is a travel ad for Nassau and the Bahamas. An elegant white couple are standing in a well-manicured garden, near a tame sea: "where the islands are dressed to the nines." The reader of the advertisement is assured that "International night owls fill the Bahamas with merriment. VIPs from Europe and America make this their watering place. Wits and Beauties. Princes and tycoons. No velvet rope ever enclosed a more glittering assemblage...
...give his arguments their widest hearing Baldwin must write for people receptive to this kind of advertisement. No writer expects to convince all of his readers. The New Yorker has as intelligent an audience as any popular magazine in this country, and many of its subscribers are as far removed from the world of "princes and tycoons" as they are from a world where people ask if they should be "integrated into a burning house." But the fact remains that Baldwin's arguments must confuse and threaten any white man who reads them. For his ideas challenge white society...
...Baldwin has already devoted a good deal of time to discussing about these things, and it now appears that his efforts may be damaging his own writings. Edmund Wilson, in the 30's, was affected by the tension between himself and his society to the point of suffering a nervous breakdown, as Baldwin had also done in the 1950's. But Wilson, while attempting to clarify things for himself, produced some excellent first-hand journalism as well as some first rate academic work on political and literary subjects. Re-reading these works now we sense a mind that was continuing...