Word: baldwinism
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...servant Lubin is played by Robin Ramsay quite legitimately as a Harlequin, complete with the customary white-face and diamond-patch costume. Making frequent use of a real slapstick in hand, he cavorts about with unflagging athleticism, and also functions as the troupe's impresario. With matching costume, Susan Baldwin makes his opposite number, Angelique's servant Claudine, into a sort of Colombine: she needs to convey more of the character's cleverness...
...James Baldwin is one of the brashest, brightest, most promising young writers in America. A New York Negro whose early novels won him a series of money grants to live and work in Europe away from race pressure, he discovered that despite everything, he had more in common with Americans-even white Southerners-than with Europeans. He came back five years ago to face again what it is to be a Negro...
...hiding behind public matters of housing and civil rights, have failed to face the real issue of racism-private human hate, which can be atoned for only by private human love. As literary critic, he has judged Negro and white writers with equal severity. Much was expected of Baldwin's new novel. Now out, it proves a failure-doubly disappointing not only because it does not live up to advance hopes, but also because it so clearly has tried to be an important book...
Chosen Identity. In one fictional fling, Baldwin has tried to unburden himself of all his feelings about racism and homosexuality, about the cacophony of despair and misunderstanding that he believes America to be. But in Another Country this is projected on a wholly inadequate fictional frame: six characters in search of love and self-knowledge in a Dostoevskian substratum of Greenwich Village. Each has been chosen as a representative of melting-pot America. Negro Rufus Scott, a jazz musician from Harlem, has never been able to learn his identity as a man because he could never forget his identity...
...James Baldwin's point that these people, hopelessly intertwined past all concern for sex or color, are interesting individuals out of whose actions the meaning of the novel must emerge. But Baldwin's writing skill, adequate in simpler novels, is not up to maneuvering so complex a collection of people. The dialogue, in which all women are referred to as "chicks," is sometimes sharply comic, often hopelessly wooden. The action, which is slight, drags. The characters' inner soul searchings too often lapse into a kind of interchangeable interior recollection that seems to be carried...