sign in sign up
<<
Home , A Dialogue, Blues for Mister Charlie, Company (novella), Death of a Prophet, Going to Meet the Man, James Baldwin

AS A WRITER OF SHORT FICTION: AN EVALUATION

dayton G. Holloway

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

December 1975 618208

ii Abstract

Well known as a brilliant essayist and gifted , James Baldwin has received little critical attention as writer. This dissertation analyzes his short fiction, concentrating on character, theme and technique, with some attention to biographical parallels.

The first three chapters establish a background for the analysis and criticism sections. Chapter 1 provides a biographi­ cal sketch and places each story in relation to Baldwin's novels, plays and essays. Chapter 2 summarizes the author's theory of fiction and presents his image of the creative writer. Chapter 3 surveys critical opinions to determine Baldwin's reputation as an artist. The survey concludes that the author is a superior essayist, but is uneven as a creator of imaginative literature. Critics, in general, have not judged Baldwin's fiction by his own aesthetic criteria.

The next three chapters provide a close thematic analysis of Baldwin's short stories. Chapter 4 discusses "The Rockpile," "The Outing," "Roy's Wound," and "The Death of the Prophet," a Bi 1 dungsroman about the tension and ambivalence between a black minister-father and his sons. In contrast, Chapter 5 treats the theme of affection between white fathers and sons and their ambivalence toward social outcasts—the white homosexual and black demonstrator—in "The Man " and "." Chapter 6 explores the theme of escape from the black community and the conseauences of estrangement and identity crises in "Previous Condition," "Sonny's Blues," "Come Out the Wilderness" and "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon." The last chapter attempts to apply Baldwin's aesthetic principles to his short fiction. Following his own artistic standards, Baldwin has created broadly sympathetic characters and realistic events in each story except "The Death of the Prophet," an undeveloped fragment. Many of his stories show fidelity to black folk expression and brilliantly reflect the psyche of oppressed people. Almost all of his stories abound in flashbacks, which establish adequate character motivation. In short, Baldwin's aesthetic intentions announced in his essays and interviews have been effectively illustrated and firmly justified by his short fiction. iii Acknowledgement

I am indebted to Dr. Prank Baldanza and Dr. Walter C. Daniel, my advisors and friends, who have provided inspiration and guidance. iv Preface

Up from the cramped tenements of , the Mecca of many black writers during the New Movement, and out of the urban schools and store-front churches, James Baldwin has emerged. While nobody knows his African name, lost for eternity in the Middle Passage, almost everybody knows his American name. Through his as a literary artist and his articulate voice, speaking out boldly and clearly for social justic* e, Baldwin has gained international recognition and his name has become a permanent part of literary and social history. A versatile, prolific, thought-provoking, emotion-arousing, and controversial artist, his works have been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Danish, Swedish and other modern languages. Although he enjoys international fame as a brilliant essayist and a talented novelist, Baldwin has received very little critical attention as a writer of short fiction. To rectify that conspicuous and serious gap in literary scholarship, this study has as its central purpose to provide a close analysis of all of Baldwin’s short fiction published during his adult career, and to V

evaluate each story, using the author’s own principles of fiction as standards of ¿judgment for the story’s literary and social value. The present study consists of six chapters which are followed by an evaluative summary. Chapter 1 serves the reader who is not very familiar with the terrain over which the author has traveled on his ¿journey toward a better understanding of himself and others. The biographical sketch concentrates on his development in Harlem, his educational background, publications, religious conversion, relations with and peers, ¿jobs, frustrations, exile, adult publications of literary works, and his life as a national celebrity. This background chapter places the author’s short fiction in a chronological perspective through which the stories are seen in relation to his essays, novels, and plays, as well as significant personal events. Chapter 2 attempts to summarize Baldwin’s theory of fiction and image of the artist as reflected in several essays, interviews, reviews and articles. A study of these published works reveals some modifica­ tions in the author's theories which were developed between the late 194-0's and the early 1970’s. An vi important chapter in this dissertation, it contains the announced intentions of Baldwin as an artist, and provides an aesthetic which will be used in the evaluation section. Those critics who have evaluated Baldwin’s work have not always ¿judged it by the author’s own yardstick. This is clearly seen in Chapter 3, which surveys critical opinion of the author as essayist, dramatist, novelist, and writer of short fiction. This chapter points up the need for additional serious study of the author as a writer of short fiction. Seeking to fulfill that need, three chapters are devoted to a close analysis of nine short stories, products of the author's adult career as artist. Instead of a chronological approach, the stories are grouped thematically. "The Rockpile" (1965), "The Outing" (1951)» and "The Death of a Prophet" (1950) comprise the first group, dealing with the tension and ambivalence in a Harlem family, and relations of the Grimes sons outside their Christian home in the secular world. To link this Bildungsroman in terms of thematic and character development, I have included an analysis of "Roy’s Wound" (1952), a sketch which incorporated into Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)* vii

Other thematic concerns growing out of these stories are sexual infatuation, religious zeal, hidden guilt, and estrangement from the father. The discussion of the four stories about the coming of age of two black brothers is followed by a treatment of the theme of affection between white fathers and sons and their ambivalence toward social outcasts; "The Man Child" (1965) and "Going to Meet the Man" (1965) focus on that relationship. Chapter 5 also deals with initiation into society, racial injustice, sexual impotence, and homosexual fantasies as significant subthemes found in those stories. The last thematic grouping consists of "Previous Condition" (1948), "Sonny’s Blues" (1957), "Come Out the Wilderness" (1958), and "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" (I960), stories which contain the escape-return motif. The thematic pattern emerging from these four stories is ambivalence, escape, estrangement, identity problems, and the recognition of a need to affirm the cultural values of race. The analysis chapters focus primarily on the development of theme and character and secondarily on biographical parallels and details intended to illuminate the short stories. Some attention is given viii to such matters as point of view, structure, and reflections of black folk culture in the short stories. The final section attempts to synthesize the points of emphasis related in the other chapters and has as its main purpose the task of evaluating the literary and social value of each of Baldwin's short works of fiction in light of his theoretical assumptions and postulates. Since his interest in his aesthetic has been on thematic development and portraiture, the evaluation concentrates primarily on his handling of theme and character delineation. And since his movement has been from rather traditional artistic standards and concerns toward an adoption of a Black Aesthetic, this evaluation will also take into account the social value of his short fiction. IX

Table of Contents

Page Preface...... iv Chapter 1. A Biographical Sketch of the Author .... 1 2. His Theory of Fiction and Image of the Artist ...... 28 5. His Reputation as a Literary Artist .... 53 4. Tension Between a Black-Minister-Father and His Sons 85 5. Affection Between White Fathers and Sons and Ambivalence toward Social Outcasts...... 121 6. Escape, Estrangement, Identity Problems, and the Need for Racial Affirmation • • . 151 An Evaluative Conclusion 192 Bibliography ...... 226 1 Chapter 1

Biographical Sketch

Essayist, novelist, short story writer, playwright, and social activist, James Arthur Baldwin was born August 2, 1924 in City’s Harlem Hospital. Emma Berdis Jones, his mother, who had migrated North from Deals Island, Maryland, worked as a domestic until illness forced her to retire in the 1960’s. In 1927 she married David Baldwin, a store­ front preacher and factory worker, who had migrated to from in search of greater economic opportunities. James was adojyted, but never fully accepted as a son in the Baldwih-4amily by his stepfather; Reverend David Baldwin had a way of always making James feel like an outcast—a bastard child.1 Consequently, in his desire to be loved and accepted, James grew closer to his mother after her p marriage. The long and ugly roots of hatred grew deeper in James Baldwin’s heart for his stepfather, who was "chilling in the pulpit” but "indescribably cruel in his personal life," as the stepson grew older.Although he held contempt for his stepfather, Baldwin loved his eight half brothers and sisters who 2 were born between 1927 and 194-3« Since both parents were common laborers and had to spend their work-days away from home, James, the elder son, was given the responsibility of rearing the other children. James Baldwin at an early age saw himself through the eyes of others. At home Reverend David Baldwin taunted hisx stepson with the idea that James was as ugly as the Devil’s son. At school the mischievous kids in the halls and on playgrounds called him "frog eyes,” “bug eyes," and "sissy."2*’ Thus, at home and at school he was persuaded to perceive himself as an ugly duckling—his skin was deep ebony, his body was frail (in fact, he was the smallest boy in his class) and his eyes were unusually large. Reject that he was, Baldwin’s early childhood was filled with pain and . Attempting to compensate for his physical unattractiveness, Baldwin decided to develop his mental muscles. He ventured into the boundless world of literature, went to the local library three or four times a week to read, and gained a more comprehensive view of the world. He was an atypical Harlem black boy who attempted to compensate for his own physical inadequacies by distinguishing himself 3 as a scholar, out of which grew his desire to become a writer.^His literary aspirations are closely linked with his desire to be accepted by others and to transcend restrictions placed on black people in the United States by the dominant white society. As a child and as an adolescent, writing for Baldwin was "an act of . It was an attempt—not to get the world’s attention—it was an attempt to be loved. It seemed a way to save myself and a way to save my family. It came out of despair. And it seemed the only way to another world. His attempt to transcend his rather hostile immediate environment and journey to another world began in his early childhood days when he was an elementary school pupil at Public School 24 in Harlem. Shortly after he had learned to read and write, he started plotting novels. His models included Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and ’s ’s Cabin, two novels that he read g through several times. The first two works that Baldwin completed were not novels, but two plays that he created when he was about nine or ten years old. The child-dramatist took his plays to school and shared them with one of his 4 teachers, a young white lady, whom Baldwin loved. His teacher was so impressed with the quality of the plays that she directed them; Baldwin’s plays were performed by students at Public School 24. (Although Baldwin does not identify the director by name, that teacher was probably Ms. Orilla Miller, one who had recognized him as something of a child prodigy, had given him books to read, had encouraged him to continue writing, and had taken him, against his stepfather’s will, to see "real" productions at respectable New York theatres.)?

The staging of his plays increased his popularity at school and in the community and motivated Baldwin to continue creating imaginative literature. . To become a playwright was not enough for Baldwin; so he decided to turn his pen, for a while, to writing short fiction. When he was twelve years old he wrote a short story about the Spanish Revolution and was successful in getting it published in a short-lived church newspaper. The lady editor of the newspaper censored certain parts of the story, "though I don’t 8 remember why," says Baldwin, "and I was outraged." His bitterness toward the lady editor was not enough to discourage his interest in creative writing, 5 though, because while he was still a pupil at Junior High School (J.H.S. 159) in Harlem, Baldwin continued to write not only plays and short stories, but songs and poems as well. He joined the newspaper staff of The Douglass , worked his way up to its editor, and contributed works frequently. In one of his editorials he expressed a desire to become one of the greatest artists of African ancestry in the theatre. Shortly before he was graduated from J.H.S. 159, students founded The Bulletin, a four-page newspaper, which included several publications by Baldwin. Although he is now ashamed of his early efforts as a writer, particularly his poetry, he was proud of them when he was a teenager. One of the greatest honors bestowed upon him in his salad days came in a letter of congratulations from New York City Mayor La Guardia, so impressed with the literary maturity of Baldwin’s works that he felt compelled to express it. The Mayor’s letter deepened Baldwin’s commitment to become an outstanding writer. Although Baldwin’s mother was very proud of her son’s accomplishments as a writer and his impressive academic record at school, and had accepted his decision to make writing his 6 career, his stepfather was strongly opposed to writing as Baldwin’s chosen occupation. Since Baldwin had earned a reputation in the community as an effective platform speaker, Reverend David Baldwin, who had restrained expression of his pride for Baldwin as orator, tried to persuade his stepson to enter the ministry; for this field, as he saw it at that , offered the best opportunities for bold and articulate young men. Full of resentment for his father, who preached one thing and did another, Baldwin, at first, set himself against the thought of ever becoming a preacher of the gospel. During the summer of 1938 he experienced a deeply traumatic religious conversion 9 at Mount Calvary of the Pentecostal Faith Church. Shortly after he "got religion," feeling full of the Power of the Holy Ghost, having the conviction of the Word branded on his bosom, and seeking love and from his stepfather by obeying his will, James Baldwin accepted his calling into the ministry. Starting at age fourteen he preached fiery sermons at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly as well as other fundamentalist churches in the greater Harlem area. As his ministry carried him from one church to 7 another, he grew increasingly skeptical of the religious principles that his calling charged him to preach, and-he discovered that fundamentalist church members were not as holy, righteous, and above sin and temptation as they professed in their testimonies.^

His own skepticism of religious dogma, coupled with his growing awareness of downright hypocrisy among the so-called saints, drove Baldwin out of the pulpit in 1941. During his three years in the ministry, contrary to his stepfather’s desire, Baldwin maintained his interest in the literary world; he served as editor of The Magpie, a magazine put out by students at De Witt Clinton High School in .(That he became editor at that predominantly white, male school is remarkable, because he did not have a good academic record there his first year.) One of his most interesting assignments as a magazine staff member was to prepare a feature article on one of the school’s distinguished graduates, Countee P. Cullen, the laureate of the , editor and literary critic, who had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key from New York University and a Master of Arts degree from Harvard University in 1926. Baldwin arranged an 8 appointment with Cullen and interviewed him. One gathers from biographer Blanch E. Ferguson’s brief description of that meeting that Baldwin’s questions concerning the black writer’s commitment to his community disturbed his former French teacher: Cullen was somewhat shocked to recognize the gap between his own conservatism and the young man’s impatience. But further reflection convinced him that the posture he had held throughout his career was an appropriate one for him. Of course, he was aware of white injustices to Negroes, and he was sensitive enough to feel deep sorrow because of this. But in his poetry he tried to show that the agony of his people was in itself a sort of spiritual triumph. The interview may have begun a split between estab­ lished writer, Cullen, and aspiring writer, Baldwin, for up until there is some evidence to support the notion that Cullen was one who had IB nourished Baldwin’s literary ambitions. After he was graduated from De Witt Clinton High School on January 29, 1942, Baldwin, no/longer minister or editor, decided to leave home, get a job, and support himself as best he could while practicing his craft at night. He worked on menial jobs in Harlem for a while, went to , found several jobs there, and was hired and fired several times because of his rebellious disposition. His frail body was not suited for heavy labor, and he had to find work that 9 did not demand much physical strength. While he worked from this job to that one in Belle Mead, New Jersey, he started writing the first draft of Go Tell It On The Mountain, which he called "Crying Holy," then, but later changed the title to "In My Father novel whose labor pains lasted for over a decade. Up until the time he moved to New Jersey, Baldwin had not suffered the effects of overt white . From his elementary school days he had been befriended by white teachers and students, Christian and Jewish. He had heard about racism, but thought that it was practiced below the Mason-Bixon line. One day in 1943 he went into a restaurant in Belle Mead, New Jersey, expecting to be served. The white waitress refused to serve him because he was a "." His first impulse was to choke her to death, but he restrained himself, threw a glass through a mirror in the restaurant, and fled to In New York, where he remained for about five years. He was to write about that incident later. 14 1 While he was in New York he met the famous black short story writer and novelist, , author of Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and (1940), both of which had made Wright an International 10 literary figure. Richard Wright, who had been his "idol since high school," took an interest in Baldwin’s development as an artist, read the first draft of Go Tell It on the Mountain, was impressed by its excellence, and helped Baldwin secure a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Award. Assisted by the fellowship, Baldwin struggled to complete his first novel. Disappointed in his progress, he tried to compensate by becoming a book reviewer for and The New YorkerAlthough some satisfaction was derived from his publications of reviews, he wanted to publish a more substantial work dealing with the activities of members of store-front churches in Harlem, which was the setting for his novel. In 1946, the same year he started writing book reviews, he collaborated with photographer Theodore Pelatwske on a book on black churches. The documentary did not meet with success. In 1948 Baldwin was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, and had his first serious short story, "Previous Condition," published in Commentary. Frustrated with himself as a writer, and with contempt in his heart for the racist elements in American life, Baldwin, at age twenty-four, on November 11, 1948, 11

began his self-imposed exile, which lasted for nine years. Seeking freedom from the stifling effect that the ^United States had on its creative artists, Baldwin took a plane to , Prance, a country that, he believed, would encourage artistic development. Following the example of the Lost Generation and Richard Wright, , and Frank Yerby, who felt that America failed to stimulate growth of the imagination through the arts, James Baldwin joined in Europe.^? The black expatriates felt

that they not only shared the problems of their fellow white artists in these United States, but had to bear the burden of their color, which stigmatized them 18 from the womb to the graveyard. Although he was not forced to drink the bitter dregs of racism in France, even though he was made to feel ’’Equal in Paris," France did not correct the indelible imprint that had etched on the sensitive areas of his brain.A change of place did not mean instant self-acceptance or acceptance by others. Paris gave Baldwin a greater sense of freedom than he had ever felt in Harlem or his bohemian Greenwich Village life, but it did not solve his 12

identity problem. Feeling that he was a "bastard of the West," he carried contempt in his heart for black people for having failed to produce a Shakespeare in the theatre, a Bach in the hall, or a Rembrandt on in the art-gallery. He also bore hatred in his bosom for white America, that had exploited the black man for centuries, and that had denied black people opportunities for development in the humanities and sciences. Having rejected his racial heritage, having decided that he did not want to identify himself as a Negro American artist, and realizing that he could not pass as a white European, Baldwin, for a while, was suspended between the white-black world without a race, 21 a country, or a name. His intense racial identity crisis and his inability to produce a significant novel fused to produce within Baldwin bitter frustration, which led to a nervous breakd&wn in 1949* 22 From Paris he went to to recover. During his recovery he wrote a couple of short stories. Commentary magazine, which had published "Previous Condition" earlier, included "The Death of a Prophet" in its issue.One year later "The Oft Outing" was published in New Story. In 1952 "Exodus," a dramatic episode from the yet-to-be- 13 published Go Tell It on the Mountain, was printed in American Mercury. 25' The turning point in Baldwin’s career as a writer was 1953, the year Go Tell It on the Mountain, a novel that Baldwin had spent about eleven years creating, finally was published. He returned to America to deliver the novel and to assure himself that his novel 26 would meet with financial success. Reviewers said that it was a novel that America and the world had been waiting for from a Black artist; the reading public, who had been buying and talking about Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), made Go Tell It on the Mountain 27 a best-seller. ' ■ In the middle 1950's Baldwin was regarded as one of the most promising young black American yet born. In recognition of his achievement and promise he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954. To fulfill his desire to capture and translate the essence of human experience in literature, he traveled widely to gather fresh material. He wrote of his many and varied experiences and published works about them in some of Europe and America’s prestigious magazines. His collection of essays and articles, (1955), went on the best-seller list. As 14 he related his personal experiences and his theories of art in Notes, he acknowledged his indebtedness to several great writers, including and Robert Fenn Warren, and expressed his admiration for his friend and fellow black writer, , "the first Negro novelist I have ever read to utilize in language, and brilliantly, some of the po and irony of Negro life.” While the reading public and critics were raving over Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin gave them a , Amen Corner, which made its world premier at Howard University theatre in 1955* (He came home and was among the spectators as the theatre curtain rose to open the production.) From Howard University the play went to Los Angeles, where it had a long successful run. In 1965 Amen Corner opened on Broadway, and was later sent on a world tour under the auspices of the United States State Department. In 1955 The National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded Baldwin a grant, and Partisan Review offered him a fellowship. In that same year he published Giovanni’s Room, a novel about . Against the wishes of some editors and friends, who said that the novel dealing with such a controversial 15

subject would wreck Baldwin’s career as an artist, he insisted on having the novel published. 7 Critical and public reaction to the novel did cause its author some embarrassment and agony following its publication, but he continued to write fiction. He gathered material for his third novel, but like Go Tell It on the Mountain, it was a stubborn piece to write.' The agony caused by the novel's slow conception and painful embryonic development was almost enough to cause Baldwin to panic: "It is the point at which many artists lose their minds, or commit suicide, or throw themselves into good works, or try to enter politics." In July of 1957 Baldwin ended his exile and returned to the United States. While he was working on his novel between 1955 and 1962, he published three lengthy short stories. Partisan Review, which had granted him a fellowship two years earlier, published ’’Sonny's Blues” in its summer issue of 1957; Mademoiselle printed "Come Out the Wilderness" in March of 1958; and "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" in September of I960 was published in the Atlantic Monthly. These stories kept Baldwin as a writer of fiction before the reading public. 16

During the 196O’s Baldwin became not only a popular writer, but also a wealthy one. (1961), a collection of essays which record his new impressions of the United States—especially the country’s treatment of its black native sons and daughters—increased his fame and swelled his bank account; it was a best-seller that invited Americans to account for the injustices on New World Civilization. A burning indictment and warning, (1963), was his follow-up to Nobody Knows My Name. Both collections became best-sellers— an unprecedented record for anthologies. He not only collected handsome royalties from his collected essays, but was made $6,500 richer from "Letter from e7 Region%n'my Mind," a 2,000-word. essay published

Baldwin's success as an essayist, in the meantime, did not command all of his attention; for he continued to produce fiction and drama. After he had struggled with the manuscript of his third novel for some seven years, he finally completed and published in 1962. On April 23, 1964, his second play, , opened at the ANTA Theatre on Broadway; following a short run in New York, the play was taken on tour to Europe. Blues was followed by Going to Meet the Man (1965), a collection of short fiction in which "The Man Child," "The Rockpile," and "Going to Meet the Man," the title story, appeared in print for the first time. With Baldwin’s prolific output of works, and his growing popularity, had to compete with other publishing companies to hold him; one , for example, offered Baldwin a $1,000,000 contract, $50,000 a year for twenty years, to join them. Baldwin became a national celebrity during the 1960’s, the decade of the black revolution for freedom and equality in the United States, e reasoned that a writer can be committed to his craft and dedicated to the struggle of his people at the same time; that literature and life.need not be separate entities.! He became involved'~in~the~CIviT Rights’Movement"with a

passion and ajsense of commitment that has been matched by few other black American writers. He traveled throughout the country, speaking to college and university students on their role in the Revolution; he outlined for them the * pathological effects of American racism; he went to Mississippi and joined Medger Evers in his investigation of the tragic Emmett 18

Till case; he interviewed at the University of Mississippi and won the George Polk Memorial Award for outstanding magazine reporting on April 4, 1963; he was an admirer of revolutionary playwright , author of A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and supported her efforts in the theatre; he marched on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and shared his American Dream on August 8, 1963; and Baldwin wrote articles for national magazines and was interviewed on several national tel-evision programs about being black_in----- America. J?o many, especially members of the white press, James Arthur Baldwin was the articulate, perceptive, and eloquent spokesman for black America. During the 1970 ’s three' works were published that contain Baldwin’s rather militant views on race. Distinguished anthropologist and world renowned author, , and Baldwin met on August 25, 1970 and talked about racism in America and the world for about seven and one-half hours; that conversation was recorded and the transcripts were transformed into £ RaP °n Race (1971)» That same year he published , a long essay summing up some of his feelings about his native land and some of its 19 leaders. Not very long after his rap with Ms. Mead, Baldwin got together with poetess for an interview. Among other subjects, they discussed the role of the black writer in the social revolution in America; (1973) is a record of that frank interview between the two popular black writers. Somehow, while he kept his extremely busy schedule doing interviews and making speeches, Baldwin found time to work on two novels and a play. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone came out in 1968. His fourth novel was followed by the publication of his latest novel, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). One Day When I Was Lost, a scenario based on The Autobiography of (1965), was released in 1973. Although Baldwin said that he had ended his self-imposed exile in the late 1950*s, and even though he spent much of his time in the United States during the first few years of the 1960’s—taking his wealth and buying an impressive brownstone in ’s West Side and making it into apartments for his mother, his sister, and himself—he has spent little time in this country since 1964. Although he comes home to his Manhattan apartment every now and then, he spends 20 a lot of his time at his $25,000 Paris apartment. He likes to travel; he loves parties. Occasionally he takes his mother and his sisters on vacations. He took his sister Paula to Prance, and his sister Gloria to Senegal, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and other African countries. He and his sister were somewhat surprised that native Africans did not recognize them as Americans: “They thought Gloria and I probably came from Dahomey.’’^' Because he has had so many experiences—felt so emotions, expressed so many thoughts, been so many places, known so many people, and written so many Works—it is not an easy task to sketch the life of Baldwin. The whole story would be voluminous in scope; and one is not sure that everything can be told, even after the last chapter has been written. Baldwin still leads an interesting life and he enjoys sharing that life with others. (His life is so varied and complex that it took journalist Pern Eckman some twenty-nine months to piece portions of it together in The Furious Passage. That provides the most complete account of his life up to the middle 1960’s. Though the book generally follows a chronological structure, some portions are achronological; and because she does 21 not provide all important information, such as dates and page numbers in her footnote entries, it is sometimes hard to pin down what took place at what time. Otherwise, the book is a valuable document.) What do all these dates, places, \pames, and events associated with the life of James Baldwin"^ - amount to? They add up to a chronicle of dreams, nightmares, fulfillment of aspirations, and hopes for things better_to-come-;—’ Baldwin has moved from being a symbol of childhood rejection, to a brilliant young scholar who is accepted by a few peers and adults, to a controversial adult writer who is despised by a few and^l-oved—by-many of his, readers. —- is'a record of fear, hatred, tolerance, and love. Just as Baldwin had contempt for his stepfather and hatred and fear of white racists and came to accept them through understanding of their motivations, he came to accept his own physical features, and has developed a healthy attitude toward his own sexuality. That he has come to identify with black people, has come to accept their strengths as well as their weaknesses, their accomplishments as well as their shortcomings, is a mark of Baldwin’s maturity and a move in the direction of racial 22 affirmation. That he has come to realize that love for black people does not necessarily mean hate for non-black peoples is a step toward humanism. People have a propensity for change, Baldwin believes, and he is one of the apostles for social reform of our troubleddays./His work is mainly social, providing insight into being poor and black in the inner-city, or successful-black in Europe. His work has the power to excite the emotional nerve endings of all peoples who have a pinch of dignity in them and who cherish the first flash of freedom. To make people feel, to provide insight into the subtleties of human experience, to move people to grant the underprivileged their humanity—these have been some of the goals of Baldwin as man and writer. As a man and artist of the people he has been at once a disturber of the peace and a peacemaker. As a victim of oppression, he speaks with authority about its causes and effects. His voice tells boys and girls lowest down on the ladder of the social order that they are not alone in their troubles; that they are not the only children in the world who suffer and are full of rage. He invites them to struggle to overcome thé limitations placed upon them, but fight with compassion. ■5 . i. 23

Although, like James Joyce, he has denounced the t organized church, deep within Baldwin he still believes in Christian principles, still believes in the golden rule and the possibilities for the brotherhood of man and the sisterhood of woman. He still believes, too, in the value, power and beauty of the folk sermon; for some of his best work is homilectic in form and content Not only is he a believer in Christian principles, he is a devout believer in democratic values. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Baldwin has seen the gap between democratic creed and practice, and this difference has distressed him. He is troubled by the ironies of American life; he cannot understand why some natives of the land of the free are still denied equal rights and responsibilities. Although at times he becomes tired and weary, he still is one of many who continue to work for justice and equality, for this is the American dream. Baldwin’s first fifty years are a record of rejection, pain, anxiety, frustration, bitterness, rage, understanding through experience, self-acceptance through an examination of aesthetic and social value systems, and continued hope for communion through understanding, and elimination of fear. He yet hopes 24 for something he yearned for as a lad on the playground of Public School 24: a better understanding of himself, and others, and acceptance and love from human beings. 25 Notes

For the best account of the relationship between stepfather and stepson, see Notes of a Native Son (Boston: , 1955), pp7~B5-lTiThis collection will be referred to hereafter as Notes. 2 In James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays (EngIewbod“Cliffs, N.J7: ’ Prenfice-Hall, 1974), p7“2, editor Keneth Kinnamon says that Baldwin has an unmistakable Oedipal complex. Notes, p. 87. One of Baldwin’s fellow pupils at Public School 24 related the taunting incidents to Fern Eckman, who included them in Furious Passage. That pupil is not identified by name. This quote from Baldwin appears in Furious Passage, p. 36. 6 In an interview with Eckman, Emma Baldwin said that James as a child read too much; see Furious Passage, pp. 31-32. One time Baldwin’s mother hid Snowe’s Uncle Tom * s Cabin from him, but he searched the house until he found it? After finding it he read It once more. When he was not reading Stowe’s novel or Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Baldwin read other novels that he. purcEasecT"from used book stores near his home for five cents apiece or six for a quarter. Notes, p. 91. Q Notes, p. 3. Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) grew out of Baldwin’s religious conversion experience. (1956) is a semiautobiographical account of' 'Baldwin’s'experience with the so-called saints. In this play he pokes fun at their double-life. When Reverend David Baldwin saw that his stepson was cooling off in the church, he asked, ’’You’d rather write than preach, wouldn’t you?” James answered, "Yes.” Notes, p. 108. 26 12 See Blanche Ferguson, and the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Dodd, Head, 19S6'), pp. 158-^9. This is the only reference to Baldwin in Ferguson’s biography. Apparently she did not know y that Cullen had taught Baldwin French at Douglass. Cullen was also advisor to the literary club, of which Baldwin was an active member; and Cullen had a reputation for working closely with all members of the club. U in James Baldwin, p. 2, editor Kinnamon says that Cullen was one of those who inspired Baldwin's early works. Baldwin rarely mentions his relationship with Cullen in his writings or interviews, but he did express his gratitude for Cullen’s help after Cullen's death. As a junior high school student, Baldwin was particularly close to Herman Porter, his math teacher, who informally adopted Baldwin. Porter recalls that friendship in an interview with Eckman (Furious Passage, pp. 41-46). 14 For an account of that incident, see Notes, PP. 94-98. A writer of dozens of reviews and articles, Baldwin’s literary career as reviewer has never received critical attention. "Previous Condition," Commentary, 6 (October 1948), 334-42. 3-7 Although the black writers are almost never mentioned along with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Crane, Bloomfield, and Cowley—the white ones—Claude McKay and Countee Cullen were also in Europe with the Lost Generation in exile. Cullen's exile did not last long, for he was back in Harlem teaching Baldwin the French language by the time Baldwin reached junior high school age. William Melvin Kelley, William Gerdner Smith, and Charlie Polite are three black writers who became expatriates during the 1960's. "Equal in Paris," Commentary, 14 (March 1950), 251-59; rpt. Notes, pp. 138-58. 27 Notes, pp. 6-7. 21 Baldwin explains how he overcame his self- hatred and contempt for others in Notes and Nobody Knows My Name, and in several other essays, articles, and interviews. "Stranger in the Village," Harper's Magazine (October 1953); rpt. Notes, pp. 159-75. "Death of the Prophet," Commentary, 9 (March 1950), 257-61. Perhaps the author considers the sketch inferior, for he did not make it a part of Going to Meet the Man (1965). "The Outing," in New Story (April 1951), 52-81. “ "Exodus,” in American Mercury (August 1962), 97-103. — 26 Actor financed Baldwin’s trip back to America, reports Eckman in Furious Passage, p. 107. A few of the important reviews of Go Tell It on the Mountain are treated in the next section. 28 Notes, p. 8.

The controversy surrounding the publication of Giovanni’s Room is a dramatic part of Eckman's Furious Passage, pp. 112-22. Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dial Press, 1961), p."22TT ~~ "A Letter from a Region on my Mind," in New Yorker, 38 (November 17, 1962), 59-144. Quoted in Eckman's Furious Passage, p. 144. 28 Chapter 2

Baldwin’s Image of the Artist and Theory of Fiction

In ’’Autobiographical Notes,” which serves as a preface to Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin maintains that “all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to he modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.”^ The study of Baldwin’s theories is a study of modifications of his views from the late 1940's to the present. That art is a discipline which has few, if any,'absolute theories, hut plenty of tentative principles, is something that Baldwin has understood from the beginning of his professional p career as a writer. From various passages in several book reviews, articles, essays, and interviews, one gathers his definitions of art, his principles of imaginative literature, and his image of the creative artist. G ~ -----From- the -beginning of his career./ Baldwin has maintained that the black man should be portrayed as 29 a whole human being who shares the joys and sorrows of common humanity .J Like Alain Locke, who wrote7~~"’for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ’kept down,’ or ’in his place,’ or ’helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden,Baldwin stands in opposition to stereotyped image of the black American in literature. With “Everybody’s Protest Novel" (1949) Baldwin begins his controversial career as literary critic. In the essay he sharply criticizes the underlying principles of the protest tradition in literature. He uses two novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Wright’s Native Son to illustrate the weaknesses of polemic fiction* One of the biggest weaknesses of protest novels is that they almost always tend to emphasize violence; this excess of violence leads to sentimentality. The black man is more than a human being who is always the object of pity; he is not always one who elicits sympathy; and to portray,him as such is "the mark of dishonesty," Baldwin believes, "The wet eyes of the 30

sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty” (14). The story of the black man in America is more than a catalogue of violence and the source of tears; conversely, it is a celebration of the Afro-American’s resilience and strong will to survive. The protest novel also fails as good literature because it presents a narrow view of life in the black community. The black man’s image is almost always that of a helpless victim in a world of cruel whites. Thus, the races of man are oversimplified, are nothing more than stereotypes, caricatures who pretend to represent humanity. "Unless one’s ideal of society is a race of neatly analyzed, hardworking ciphers, one can hardly claim for the protest novels the lofty purpose they claim for themselves or share the present optimism concerning them. They emerge for what they are: a mirror of our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream" (19). —--''Baldwin sees a distinction between literature ( and sociology. He views Native Son as a fairly good '(i - - 31

social study of a deprived black boy, but the central character in the novel is_reduced to a symbol of ^social discontent; is not a realistic character because he does not embody the , emotional, and cultural essence of black people. He does not live a life separate from the strangle-hold of white America. Unlike most black Americans, the central character in Native Son "has accepted a theology which denies him life . he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult—to accept it" (23). While the sociologist may view the black man as a problem to be solved, the novelist should he concerned with the outer and inner life of man. The creative writer ought to write about the indefinable and unpredictable nature of man. The artist is an observer who collects impressions; he is not one who gathers statistical data and reaches conclusions about the nature of man or the community in which he lives. The concern of the artist is with man's ambiguity, 32 the paradoxical situations that man often finds himself in, and the ironic conditions that surround him. When writers capture the essence of the ambiguous nature of men and women in American society, and readers begin to understand and accept the fact that races are made up of individuals rather than fixed categorical types, then all people will move closer to freedom; "we will find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves." An implicit of the protest novel is that black people can not transcend racial limitations, are incapable of entering the world of common humanity, and are unable to see suffering as a part of being human. This is one of the distortions that must be corrected, in Baldwin’s view. To be black in America does not mean that one thinks about his blackness or his oppression twenty- four hours a day. The black artist is not obligated to write about the dehumanization of black people every time he picks up his pen; his job is not always to plead for his own humanity—to beg white folks to recognize the humanity of his people,* If the artist wishes to do those things, he should write an essay, not a novel or a short story to illustrate his personal views about racial oppression. While the propagandist is one who pledges his devotion to humanity, who devotes his life to a Cause, the artist, on the other hand, avoids these transient pitfalls. A work of art should not advance a specific Cause; it should be a reflection of the author’s attempt to reveal something about the commond bonds of races; it should depict a human experience that touches human beings of all colors and creeds. To make the artist directly responsible to some Cause in society is to make him one of the cogs in the wheel of civilization; but the artist must be free from that responsibility in order to write objectively about the reality he observes. Before Baldwin expressed his opposition to the tendencies of the protest novel, he maintained a friendship with Richard Wright. Not only did Wright view "Everybody’s Protest Novel" as an attack on his own protest fiction, but he saw the essay as a personal attack; it created bitterness in Wright, and subsequently caused the friendship between the two writers to dissolve. Although Richard Wright was very proud of the fact that he was a black writer, writing about black 34 people’s experiences, James Baldwin saw this as a limitation. Like Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen before him, Baldwin desired to be recognized as an American writer, not as a Negro. To be called a Negro writer before the early 1950‘s was almost synonymous with being referred to as a polemicist who pleaded to white audiences for sympathy, or who threatened them with a Native Son. Baldwin left the United States in 1948 because he wanted to prevent himself "from becoming merely a 6 Negro, or even, merely a Negro writer." When Baldwin compares the accomplishments of black people in music to their achievements in fiction, he concludes that the musical compositions are superior in content because they tell the story of blacks; the work songs, , blues, and jazz pieces capture the religious, social, and psychic history of black Americans. Baldwin does not see this in Black American fiction.?

Anyone familiar with the works of black writers before the 195O’s can not read Baldwin’s claim without argument. The novels and short stories of Charles Waddell Chesnutt contain the folk beliefs and practices of Blacks during the late nineteenth 35 8 century. James Weldon Johnson’s novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), is recognized as one of the first novels to create realistic black characters, and is regarded as an important work of art.^ The stories of the Harlem

Renaissance writers have become a permanent part of American literature. Like the folk songs of the black man, the fiction has helped to relate the spiritual history and the cultural traditions of black people. "" In "Many Thousands Gone" Baldwin calls for a work of fiction that portrays individuals with human problems and concerns, unique characters who are not engaged in "an impossible, a fruitless tension between the traditional master and slave" (42). Baldwin desires to see a novel or a short story that presents a credible character who has psychological complexity, who is affected by the social and cultural traditions of his community, and who develops beyond purely racial concerns; this seems to be Baldwin’s intention in Go Tell It on the Mountain, which was published two years after the essay. . The black novel should interpret the isolation of the black man within his own group and the fury that' results from that alienation. Moreover, the , 56 black novel should have a keen sense of tradition and ritual, and should make use of the spiritual history of people; it should show how blacks have lived in the past and how they live today; and it should he a celebration of survival and endurance. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which was released one year after “Many Thousands Gone," seems to have fulfilled Baldwin’s dream of reading a black work that contains all of the qualities asked for in his essay (8). One of the purposes of the writer of fiction is to ’’show the blood relationship between the white man and black man in America” and to illustrate ’’how very much it contains of the force, and anguish and terror of love” (42). A sense of the history, traditions and rituals,- to Baldwin, is ultimately more important than a sense of rage, violence, and hate. Baldwin does not see the artist as the spokesman for his people. He maintains that no writer can accept the awesome responsibility of representing the desires of his people and bearing of their burdens upon his shoulders. Unlike Shelley, who believed that writers are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," Baldwin sees this legislative function as a false responsibility because novels, unlike laws, do not bring about social and political change directly. ______In "Autobiographical Notes" (1955) Baldwin says /that his own experiences are the reference points in his works. He believes that a writer should attempt to re-create his own experiences and the experiences of others. The artist has as his task to create order out of chaos, and to capture the essence of human experiences. "It is part of the business of the writer ... to examine attitudes, to go beneath the '‘surface, to tap the source" (5-6). To capture the

essence of black life and culture is not an easy task, Baldwin says, because that area of human concern has not received very much serious attention from writers. Once the artist realizes and creates works about his own people, only then is he free to write about the experiences of other races. While the artist is re-creating the history, traditions, customs, moral assumptions, and I preoccupations of his people and his country, he must divorce himself from purely social and political concerns. The artist maintains that distance, not because he lacks a sense of personal identity or responsibility, but because be wishes to describe the concerns and activities of people with some degree of objectivity. Although an audience may view the artist with indifference, and the artist may feel that there is "a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent,” this tension should challenge the artist to make his craft important. The serious writer is not discouraged by public criticism; he should ignore it and continue to develop his creative ability. As a young artist Baldwin'hated himself, and blacks and whites as groups. As an adult writer he realized that this hatred prevented him from writing objectively about his experiences. During his exile he discovered that hatred held a murderous power over him and that he had to eliminate that emotion before he could create art. In Europe he learned to accept his past and to "love America more than any other country in the world." Because he loves America and feels that it is his responsibility to help change her, he has used the personal and social essay "to criticise her perpetually" (9). After Baldwin ended his exile, his views about the nature of literature and the image of the artist 39 underwent changes. Before 1957 he saw the artist as a preserver of culture, as one standing outside the crowd in order to get a better view of it, and one whose works do not reflect immediate social concerns; but when Baldwin returned home and became involved in the race struggle his theories changed along with his fiction. He became concerned not only with the private life of his people as a subject, but saw the writer’s ability to explore private life a mark of his achievement.3"®

Richard Wright had always accepted the raising of social consciousness as his task as writer. James Baldwin, after having rejected that role for years, gradually began to change his image of the artist from one who provides aesthetic pleasure to one who disturbs the peace of the middle class lovers and collectors of art. The artist should constantly remind his readers of the harsh realities of the oppressed people of the world. He must show American audiences their own bewilderment and emptiness. Baldwin warns writers not to fall into the same trap that the mass media producer has allowed himself to be thrown into by a violence-loving, escapist audience. To show the failure of our American way of 40

life, to show the difference between the distorted self-concept and the true image of the self, "this is the job of the creative artist." lthough Baldwin sees the artist as a devout disciple of Truth, his emphasis on the negative aspects of American life suggests a fogging over of truth; all values in our American system have not failed. Perhaps it is upon the short-comings, rather than the accomplishments, that the subject-matter of fiction should focus its attention, but to present the United States as one junk-yard, one warp-land, is just as much of a distortion as to present her as the land of the free and the home of the brave. Prom time to time, as Is obvious from the foregoing, Baldwin has a tendency to make sweeping generalizations; but over­ emphasis has gained more attention for the black man than has under-emphasis.) In "Mass Culture and the Creative Artist" Baldwin says that Americans need to be constantly reminded that "we are in the world, that we are subject to the same catastrophes, vices, joys and follies which have baffled and afflicted mankind for ages • • • • Perhaps life is not the black, unutterably beautiful, , and lonely thing the creative 41

artist tends to think of it as being; but it certainly is not the sunlit playpen in which so many Americans lose first their identities and then their minds, That the artist creates his work in solitude does not distress Baldwin; for he maintains that in order to produce valuable works of literature, one must accept the fact that he is a loner, and "must actively cultivate that state of being alone" (376)• Apart from the world of emotions and experiences that provide him material, the writer gains hindsight, insight, and foresight; he has a clearer view of the people and events than the average working man. In "The Creative Dilemma" (1964) Baldwin's image of the artist is that of a humanitarian, a moral leader and an illuminator of the unexplored caves of the human psyche. Literature has as its purpose to show man's humanity as well as inhumanity to man; if the artist's purpose is fulfilled, the world will be "a 12 more human dwelling place." The artist teaches the world that birth, suffering, love and death are universal and inescapable, and he reminds people that they are a part of the natural world and they must, like it, change; that nothing in the universe is constant. 42

One problem faced by Americans is that they lack an understanding of their history and an appreciation of their culture. Consequently, many Americans lack self-understanding. The artist must look back into the social and cultural history of America and try to discover what produced the personalities in this unique experience. As the artist takes a look backward, he should also take a look inward. He is both actor and experimenter: The artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society—the politicians, legislators, educators, and scientists—by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being. Society must accept some things as real; but he must always know that visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our actions and achievement rests on things unseen.(15) The writer who takes his responsibility seriously is at war with his society; he runs the risk of being ostracized and victimized by the same people that he wishes to save from narrowness and self-destruction. "I am really trying to make clear the nature of the artist’s responsibility to his society. The particular nature of this responsibility is that he must never cease warring with it, for its sake or for his own. • • • 43

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real” (58).

In A Dialogue (1973) Baldwin sees himself as "a kind of poet" who is directly responsible to black people, the race that produced him,^^ He foresees the coming of a holocaust and feels that, when black people need him, he will be prepared to make his contribution to the struggle. He feels that there is a definite connection between literature and liberation. The artist helps to liberate his people by making them aware of their own strength and potential. But the writer should not deceive his people; he still should be devoted to truth. The black writer should celebrate the fact that black people in America "have survived the roughest game in the history of the world." The black artist can help build black identity and unity: You read something or you hear something, and you realize that your suffering does not isolate you; your suffering is your bridge. Many people have suffered before you, many people are suffering around you and always will, and all you as a writer can do is bring, hopefully, a little light into that suffering. Enough light 44

so that the person who is suffering can begin to comprehend his suffering and change the situation. We don’t change anything; all we can do is invest people with the morale to change it for themselves.(74) Although Baldwin is a gifted artist, he places almost no emphasis on such things as style, structure, point of view, or unity in his essays about art. In his conversation with Nikki Giovanni, he does suggest that writers should understand connotations of words and use words skillfully. The black writer, according to Baldwin, must assert himself and create his own definitions of himself and his art. He cannot accept the definitions and principles of the white world and at the same time see himself in a positive sense. The rules of the white cultural commissars must be rejected; no one ought to try to tell the writer what he should write or what his subject-matter should be. In our revolutionary times, "the artist is not free do do what he wants to do; the artist is free to do what he has to do" (83-84). In recent years Baldwin has come to have very little respect for white critics. He says that he is bound by no law or artistic standard held by white critics. " No white critic can judge my work. I'd be 45 a fool if I depended on that judgment." He does not hate critics, but he feels that a "real critic is very rare," When a critic understands the real feeling of the blues, then he is qualified to judge black works, Baldwin maintains. "I would rather a fourteen-year old kid said, 'I don’t like that essay or don’t like that poem.’ I can relate to that because I know that he read it and he understood it" (83-84). The foregoing survey of works written between 1947 and 1973 provides Baldwin’s image of the artist and his theory of fiction. From his early publications one gathers that the artist should be an interested, but objective, observer of human activity; that he is one who ought to separate himself from his society in order to perceive it clearly. In his descriptions and portrayals he must avoid self- righteous sentimentality; investigate the causes of violence, rather than, like the traditional protest writer, overemphasize its immediate effects on the human psyche; create complex, realistic, credible, dynamic characters, rather than simple, sentimental, static and stereotypic characters; show the ironic, paradoxical and ambiguous aspects of people in American society; and reveal and preserve in literature the true 46 psychic, spiritual, cultural and social history of his people through an exploration of public and private life. Not unlike those of most writers, Baldwin’s theories of art have been influenced by his predecessors as well as his contemporaries. His theories are essentially eclectic: for example, from and T. S. Eliot he draws the idea of the objective narrator and the objective correlative; like James Weldon Johnson and Jean Toomer before him, he seeks to find in the folklore and folklife of black people an archetype of the human condition;^2*' and like

Melvin B. Tolson, he has "absorbed the Great Ideas of the Great White World, and interpreted them in the melting-pot idiom" of black people.A statement made by the black-critic-scholar Jay Saunders Redding in 1939 about is also relevant to Baldwin’s theory of fiction: The essential quality of good poetry is utmost sincerity and earnestness of purpose. A poet untouched by his times, by his conditions, by his environment is only half a poet, for earnestness and sincerity grow in direct proportion as one feels intelligently the pressure of immediate life. One may not like the pressure and the necessities under which it forces one to labor, but one does not deny it.16 47

In their theoretical assumptions and principles concerning fiction, Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, who- have been friends for over two decades, share the belief that the purpose of the sociologist and the intention of the artist differ significantly. "Unfortunately," writes Ellison, "many Negroes have been trying to define their own predicament in exclusively sociological terms, a situation I consider quite short­ sighted. Too many of us have accepted a statistical interpretation of our lives and thus much of that which makes us a source of moral strength to America goes unappreciated and undefined." The two writers are also one in their belief that there is a distinction between polemics and pure art. "I have no desire to write propaganda," explains Ellison. "Instead I felt it impossible to explore the full range of American Negro humanity and to affirm those qualities which are of value beyond any question of segregation, economics or previous condition of servitude. The obligation was always there and there is much to affirm. From works published during the 1960's one begins to observe some revisions in Baldwin’s theory of art. The artist maintains an interest in developing his craft, but seeks to bring about social change through 48 literature. The writer attempts to maintain aesthetic distance in his art, while he involves himself personally in the struggle to achieve human rights. In short, he desires to maintain a balance between literature as an artistic concern, and literature as a social concern; he still has essence and order as his central purpose in art, but his work serves the need of liberation of the oppressed. Modifications in Baldwin's theory of art reflect some influence from Imamu , Hoyt Fuller, and Addison Gayle, Jr., the major designers and 18 advocates of The Black Aesthetic theory. They maintain that black literature is ideological, supports , consciousness, cultural and institutional ideals. Literature that does not fulfill these purposes is merely work written by Negroes, not Black literature. Furthermore, Black art, they believe, can be judged by black critics, those most familiar with the social, cultural, economic, and political experiences of black people. That black people have developed an aesthetic system—a way of judging beauty—is not a new idea, as Darwin T. Turner points in a recent article about DuBois' theory of a black aesthetic. 7 When Baldwin insists that only the 49 people who can empathize with his work through their experience should he his critics, he is in agreement with the apostles of the Black Aesthetic. Like Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks—to name only a few Afro-American authors—James Baldwin has come to discover through experience that one cannot escape his blackness. A statement he made in a review of ' Selected Poems in March of 1959 may very well serve as Baldwin’s own epitaph: "Hughes is an American Negro poet and has no choice but to be acutely aware of it. He is not the first American Negro to find the war between his social and artistic 20 responsibilities all but irreconcilable." 50

Notes

Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), P? 9.. Subsequent references to Notes will appear parenthetically in the text of this chapter. In Short Stories: A Critical Anthology (New York: Macmillan^1 I97TJ7""pp7’ 5-61, e3itiors“72nsaf Thune and Ruth Pigozy include an excellent survey of critical theories about the short story as a genre. They conclude, "Each impression of life conveyed through the house of fiction is unique, and should not be measured in terms of rules and standards outside itself." Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (1925; rpt. New York: Antheneum, 1970)7 p.' 3. ~ "Men of careful terms, haters of forks in the road,/ The strain at the eye, that puzzlement, that awe--/ Grant me that I am human, that I hurt,/ That I can cry," writes Gwendolyn Brooks in Selected Poems (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 557" 5 For a fuller explanation see Maurice Charley's "James Baldwin's Quarrel with Richard Wright," in American Quarterly, 15 (Spring 1963), 65-75« Quoted in Herbert Hill, ed.,. Black Voices (London, 1964), p, 402. ? "Many Thousands Gone," in Partisan Review, 17 (November-December, 1951), 665-80. Subsequent references appear parenthetically. Q For example, see Sylvia Render's The Short Fiction of Charles W, Chesnutt (Washington, D7C.: Howard^Umversiry Press, 19747, pp. 3-56. Also Hugh M, Gloster, "Charles W. Chesnutt: Pioneer in.the Fiction of Negro Life," in PhyIon, 2 (First Quarter, 1941), 57-66. Russell Ames7’""’S6cial Realism in Charles W. Chesnutt," in Phylon, 13 (Second Quarter, 1953), 199-206. q 7 Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America (1958; rpt. New Haven, Conn.: Press, ¿965). Stephen M* Ross, "Audience and Irony in 51

Johnson's 'Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,'" in C.L.A. Journal, 18 (December 1974), 198-210. Robert E. Fleming, "Contemporary Themes in Johnson's •Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,'" in Negro American Literary Forum, 4 (1970), 120-24. In Herbert Gold, ed., Fiction of the Fifties (New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 1"8-T9. "Mass Culture and the Creative Artist," in Daedalus, 89 (Spring I960), 373-76. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in text. "The Creative Dilemma" in Saturday Review, 47 (February 8, 1964), 14-15, 58. Subsequent" references appear parenthetically, IB J~ames Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni: A Dialogue (New York: J. B. Lippincotb,' 1973), p. '36. ”In preparing the transcript for publication the authors made slight changes in word choice and syntax. Charles T. Davis, "Jean Toomer and the South: Region and Race Elements within a Literary Imagination," in Studies in Literary Imagination, 7 (Fall 1974), 23-57: Melvin B. Tolson, "The Poet's Odyssey," in Herbert Hill, ed., Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States (New York: Harper and Row,~"19SS5, p? IS4.” 16 Jay Saunders Redding, To Make a Poet Black (Chapel Hill: University of ^Tress, 1939), p. 96. " 3,7 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 16-17. For an explanation of this theory, see, for example, LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka), "The Black Aesthetic," in Black World, 18 (September 1969), 5-6; Addison Gayle, Jr.",""The "Black Aesthetic (New York: Doubleday, 1971). Darwin T. Turner, "W.E.B. DuBois and the Theory of a Black Aesthetic," in Studies in the Literary Imagination, 7 (Fall 197^-), ï-2l. 20 Quoted in Maurice Charley's "James Baldwin’s Quarrel with Richard Wright," p. 65. 53 Chapter 3

Baldwin’s Reputation as Literary Artist

A prolific writer of book reviews, articles, essays, novels, short stories, and plays—from the 1920’s to the present decade—James Arthur Baldwin has been a figure of praise and a target of protest for critics and scholars for over two decades. His work has taken its place alongside of those by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison—the major black authors of America.^ His own primary works, plus secondary and tertiary works by others about Baldwin, are enough to fill three checklists that have been published by Russell G. Fisher, Kathleen A, Kindt, and Fred o L, Standley in the Bulletin of Bibliography. His essays and works of fiction have been reprinted in every major anthology of Afro-American literature that has been published in the last two decades, while others have appeared in general American anthologies. His life—so inextricably connected with his works, and perhaps just as complicated—has inspired The Furious Passage of James Baldwin, a journalistic biography by Fern Marja Eckman,^* Just recently, scholarly essays about his works have been collected 54 by Dr. Keneth Kinnamon and have been made a part of the distinguished Twentieth Century Views series, whose aim, in part, is "to present the best contemporary 4 critical opinion on major authors." That Baldwin is, indeed, a major author, is a subject open for debate, it seems. To resolve that question in this study is not my main purpose. To survey critical opinion concerning Baldwin’s reputation is my intention. Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Dr. Keneth Kinnamon says, "With a deep interest in the most debatable issues of personality, race, and history, Baldwin has deliberately sought controversy, and his work has elicited in turn the most diverse critical opinions.Professor Kinnamon’s statement needs further qualification; for although Baldwin as a dramatist and writer of fiction has elicited a range of critical opinions, almost all critics agree that Baldwin has most firmly established his reputation as a writer of formal and informal essays. Dr. Darwin T. Turner does not sing alone when he intones that Baldwin is "the best-known Negro writer today and one of the most distinguished essayists writing in the English language.Turner-’s voice strikes an harmonious chord with a chorus of 55 critics, including Robert A. Bone, Langston Hughes, Theodore Gross, and Charles Newman, among others, who have been singing hallelujahs to Baldwin as a master of the essay genre since Notes of a Native Son was published in 1955. John Thompson is one of many who admire the precise and well-ordered style of Baldwin’s essays, which he describes as "very sophisticated models of exposition."? Theodore Gross joins Thompson in his note of praise when he declares that Baldwin o is "one of the greatest American Rhetoricians." What has impressed critics most about Baldwin as essayist is described by Gross here: Baldwin’s eloquent, forceful style has given his work its wide recognition. The intricate, convoluted sentences; the musical, sinuous rhythms of the prose; the dramatic stance, poised between a straightforward rendition of the facts, and a lyrical interpretation of them; the oratorical cadences*of clauses within clauses— all of these characteristics contribute to a style that is immediately recognizable, the inimitable signature of an absolutely lucid vision. But Baldwin's style is more than a fit instrument of his ideas. It is the living illustration of what can be achieved by a Negro who has existed in a culturally constricting environment; and in its discussion of oppression, racial segregation, inadequate social and cultural opportunities, its sophisticated grace serves as ironic commentary on the problems it considers.9 Gross’ high appraisal is backed by Irving Howe, who pays Baldwin one of the highest tributes: "Whatever 56 his ultimate success or failure as a novelist, Baldwin has already secured his place as one of the two or three greatest essayists this country has ever produced. He has brought a new luster to the essay as an art form, a form with the possibilities of discursive reflection and concrete drama which make it a serious competitor to the novel, until recently almost unchallenged as the dominant genre in our time.”^

Although as an essayist he has received more critical acclaim than any other black writer since Dr. William Edward Burghardt DuBois, who collected his brilliant essays in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and other anthologies, Baldwin’s reputation as a- playwright is controversial. From his childhood days, when he wrote plays and had them staged for elementary school pupils, Baldwin has maintained an interest in the theatre. As editor of The Magpie in high school he announced his ambition to become an outstanding playwright: "If I am to be a playwright, I should try to improve a troubled world, and try to numbered among the great artists of my race."1^.

Apparently, his image of the dramatist as polemicist has not changed significantly in his adult life; his 57 role as one who leads an aggressive attack against the status quo in the theatre disturbs drama critics. In general, critics have found Baldwin’s Amen Corner (1958) nor Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), his professionally produced plays, very impressive as works of art. Robert A. Bone, for example, recognizes the former as a ’’competent apprentice play," but the latter as an "unspeakably bad propaganda piece." He asserts that Baldwin as a writer is "weakest as 12 playwright." Christopher Bigsby, like Bone, admires The Amen Corner, because the play is raised above purely racial concerns to a level of objectivity and universality. "Less squarely centered on the racial conflict, it evidences something of that vital compassion which is to be found in Lorraine Hansberry’s work,"^

The Amen Corner, a play Baldwin said he wrote to explain "what those brothers and sisters were like when they weren't wearing their long white robes," is given a mark of approval by critics, but they are not saying that it is one of the greatest plays of the American theatre.Pretentious behavior among the saints and holy rollers is a fit subject for the theatre, they all agree, but blatant protest against 58 injustice, like that found in Blues for Mister Charlie, has no place on the stage, they protest. John Simon is one of the play’s opponents who hold this view: Baldwin, the playwright, doth protest too much. And not only too much, hut too soon. Right at the outset of Blues for Mister Charlie we are clobbered with a tirade w5Tch"”is an inflammatory inventory of all the injustices toward the Negro, and, justified as these grievances are, they strike a false note: you do not paint a picture that is to be a work of art with air brush or poster paint—unless, that is, you are a pop artist—and Baldwin would shudder at the* thought of having written a pop-art play. But that is what it is: agit-prop art.1-? The title of Christopher Bigsby’s article, "Committed Writer: James Baldwin as Dramatist," leads one to believe that Bigsby has a favorable view of the playwright’s work; but such a title is misleading. Bigsby praises Baldwin as essayist and novelist, does a close study of Blues for Mister Charlie, and concludes that it "matches with disturbing precision his own definition of sterile protest literature." 16 A bitter taste is left in Bigsby’s mouth because Blues dehumanizes whites and sentimentalizes blacks. The committed writer has disappointed Mr. Bigsby’s expectation and he sings the blues. (Was that not the playwright’s purpose?) Walter Meserve summarizes several negative views of critics when he says that Baldwin's thesis 59 plays are talky, over-written, preachy, argumentative dramas full of clichéd dialogue and populated by stereotypic characters. But he tempers his unfavorable view somewhat when he writes, "Essentially Baldwin is not particularly dramatic, but he can be extremely eloquent, compelling and sometimes irritating as a playwright committed to his approach to life . . . Baldwin is not ignorant of the art of the theatre, neither is he always effective in creating theatrical excitement, probably because he accepts too readily the idea of playwright as polemicist."^7

If Baldwin has become a polemicist as a play­ wright, has he also become a polemicist as novelist? In "Everybody's Protest Novel" and "Many Thousands Gone," two essays which attacked the’protest novel, and created conflict between Baldwin and Richard Wright, Baldwin announced his intention to avoid the role as novelist-polemicist. Rather than gain attention as an essayist or dramatist, he has, throughout his adult life, always wanted to achieve recognition as a competent novelist, whose work transcends the limitations of protest fiction. Since his first novel, though, his reputation as novelist 60 has become a subject of considerable debate, Robert A. Bone is among critics who rank Go Tell It on the Mountain as an outstanding novel among other black novels. Bone says that it is Baldwin's best novel, and he says that it belongs in a class with the best pieces of fiction written by Afro-Americans, including The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) by James Weldon Johnson; Cane (1923) by Jean Toomer; Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright; and invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison.^®

Like Bone, Joseph Featherstone says that Go Tell It on the Mountain is Baldwin’s finest achievement in fiction. “The beauty of the language ... brought the hero's experience of salvation to life; and, faithful to the spirit of the blues, Baldwin left much of the book's anguish unresolved,” writes Featherstone.^ Critic J. Saunders Redding is impressed with the "beauty of sincerity" and the "subjective truth" in the novel. Although he recognizes that parts of the novel reflect the style of Faulkner, the of Wright, and the theme of Dostoevski, Redding says, "And yet style, story, and theme are Baldwin's own, made so by the operation of the strange chemistry of talent which no one fully 20 understands." 61

George Kent asserts that Baldwin’s novels since Go Tell It on the Mountain, though fine in segments, ’’tend to reflect a hiatus in his artistic development .... Since his first novel he has not evolved the artistic form that will fully release and pi articulate his obviously complex awareness." Critics generally have a favorable opinion of Baldwin’s first novel, as they do of his first play Amen Corner. But with Giovanni * s Room, that controversial novel about homosexuality and love, Baldwin’s reputation as novelist begins to suffer at the hands of critics. Some white critics like the novel; some black critics hate it. Granville Hicks says, "Much of the novel is laid in scenes of squalor, with a background of characters as grotesque and repulsive as any that can be found in ’s Cities of the Plain, but even as one is dismayed by Mr. Baldwin’s materials, one rejoices in the skill with which he renders them . . • .Mr. Baldwin’s subject is rareness and difficulty of love, and, in his rather startling way, he does a great deal with pp it." William Esty is more explicit: "Giovanni's Room is the best American novel dealing with homosexuality I have read. James Baldwin 62 successfully avoids the cliche literary attitudes: over-emphasis on the grotesque and the use of homosexuality as a fragile symbol for the estrangement which makes possible otherwise unavailable insights into the workings of ’normal* society." And Esty is pleased because the characters are real—are complex, and credible. If Baldwin were not an essayist and had he not written Go Tell It on the Mountain, one feels that black critic Arthur P. Davis would have excluded Baldwin from The Dark Tower, because Davis frowns upon Baldwin’s other novels * including Giovanni * s Room. Why dbes a black novelist have to deal with the subject of homosexuality, especially homosexuality among whites in Europe, Davis seems to ask. In spite of his distaste for the subject, Davis grudgingly allows that Giovanni's Room "treats openly and with a certain measure of dignity the homosexual theme." He continues, "The work is, among other things, a plea for honesty in sexual matters. Although it gives considerable insight into the homosexual mind, the Oft novel is not an impressive work." Unlike Arthur P. Davis, social critic and activist in is blunt in 63 his appraisal of Giovanni's Room: "Baldwin's work is so void of a political, economic, or even a social reference. His characters seem to be fucking and sucking in a vacuum. Baldwin has a superb touch when he speaks of human beings, when he is inside of them— especially his homosexuals—but he flounders when he looks beyond the skin."2^ Cleaver wants Baldwin to become the polemic novelist like Richard Wright, Cleaver's hero. More controversy was to come with Another Country over Baldwin's status as. a novelist. Christopher Bigsby ranks Baldwin above Richard Wright. Unlike Richard Wright, says Bigsby, Baldwin’s novels reflect his ability to distinguish between artistic and sociological concerns. While Wright's novels achieve only racial absolutism, Baldwin's novels achieve universality. In Bigsby's estimation, Another Country is Baldwin's best novel, for it best explores pg the dimensions of the human condition. Theodore Gross does not share Bigsby's evaluation: One of the central problems in Baldwin’s novels, most obviously illustrated in Another Country, is the conflict between naturalistic and transcendental elements. When these conflicts are in a moral tension, as in Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin's achievemenF“is“impressive, but when the naturalistic elements become 64

dominant, his fiction can become harsh? grating, or embarrassingly sentimental, as in Giovanni * s Room and Another Country. The idea commands our respect, but it''tends to become more important than the characters who represent the idea; conception and form have not yet coalesced. ' Gross is disturbed by characterization in the fiction of Baldwin, too. He says that Baldwin has rejected white American stereotypes of blacks and has replaced them with reverse stereotypes of whites. His characters, therefore, have been reduced to types: symbols, ideas, and victims; his white characters are the oppressors and the black characters are the 28 oppressed. Dennis Donoghue says that Baldwin resorts to stereotypes in fiction because he is weak on invention. ”If he has seen or heard or suffered something, he can transcribe it. But if he has to invent a character, a world for him, and devise other characters to live in that world, he is defeated.

Baldwin’s reputation as novelist suffers more with Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968) than with any other single novel of his career. In terms of its development of character and theme, the novel is Baldwin’s weakest, according to Arthur P. Davis, who believes, further, that the novel 65 flounders in its description of the theatre world. Like Davis, Calvin C. Hernton is disappointed by- Baldwin’s efforts; he finds nothing new in the novel; it is merely a recapitulation of old characters and themesZ3" Like Herat on, Guy Davenport is distressed over its loose structure, and suggests that Baldwin move to another genre: "If we accept the most powerful of the scenes as short stories and forget the creaking frame we have a fine array of episodes. Mr. Baldwin’s immense talent, it would seem, is perhaps not fit for the novel but for the stage, the short story, or even the moving picture. He has yet to organize a novel that progresses from a beginning to an end."'’2

Apparently Baldwin took Davenport’s advice seriously, for If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) tightens the structure, and that effort, along with others, redeems him as novelist. Unlike Train, reviewers call Beale Street a "disarmingly genuine narrative."The story is told gently and simply."^’

Arthur Carley says that the novel’s construction is skillful; that it is a tale filled with emotional dynamite. "The courage of a young couple, cruelly separated by a wrongful imprisonment, and the fierce 66 determination of a loyal family are rare and inspiring elements in contemporary fiction. Judged as literature this is a bit precious, tugging cleverly at our emotions.” Carley is also pleased that the author has, at last, shifted from bitterness to love as a theme, Carley is joined by Ivan Webster and Joyce Carol Oates In a salute to the novel. Webster calls Beale Street a major work of fiction and praises the author’s affirmative, mordant, comical, and direct treatment of character and theme. He says, "The narrative is a remarkable blend of lyricism and speed, and beneath the whisper and hurry of the story you can feel Baldwin and Tish in a kind of subtextual dialogue. Tish engages, even astonishes Baldwin as no other character he has ever written about." He says that the author maintains the correct aesthetic distance between himself and the narrator. -56 Joyce Carol Oates finds the story a kind of allegory and parable at once, "stressing the irresolute nature of our destinies . . . the novel is quietly powerful, never straining or exaggerating for effect." It "is a moving, painful story. It is so vividly human and so obviously based upon reality, 67 that it strikes us as timeless—an art that has not the slightest need of aesthetic tricks, and even less need of fashionable apocalyptic excess.“ Although a great deal of critical opinion has focused on Baldwin the essayist, the novelist, and some attention has been centered on him as a dramatist, almost nobody knows his name as a writer of short fiction. Of the dozen or so short stories that he has published, eight of them in his collection Going to Meet the Man (1965), only three, "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon," ’’Previous Condition,” and "Sonny’s Blues" have been written about in national literary journals.Other than those three articles, and notes here and there in works dealing with Baldwin’s novels and plays, and introductory comments made by anthologists, the greatest critical attention to the Baldwin short story comes from reviewers of Going to Meet the Man. Those who have reviewed that collection do not stand as one in their evaluation of Baldwin as a writer of short fiction. Rather than looking with favor or disfavor upon the stories as a whole, they like or dislike certain stories in the anthology. 68

For example, Seymour Krim particularly likes “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” for its smooth and natural cadences. In his estimation the story is one of Baldwin's finest artistic works in the area of fiction.^9 Likewise, Dennis Donoghue says that "the

story brings out the artist in Baldwin • • • . It is a short story, so he does not have to strain, pulling and hauling, pumping the prose: there is no recourse to the Public Address System. It is beautifully done." "Measure, scale, tact," he continues, "are the marks of the story. And the writing is at once controlled and free." In Donoghue's opinion/ "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" and "Sonny’s Blues" are "far better than anything else Mr. Baldwin has done in fiction."Z,'0 Apparently other critics agree, for

the former story is included in The Best Short Stories (1961) and The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers (1967). Oscar Handlin, on the contrary, allows that there are moving passages in the story, but "the narrative is inadequate to sustain the brooding, 41 introspective mood the author wishes to convey." Although Handlin dislikes the narrative element in "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon," he favors the narrative and Baldwin's handling of character in 69

"The Man Child.” He says that it is the only story in the anthology in which the characters come alive and are credible. Not so! says Daniel Stern; "The Man Child" is one of the two failures in Going to Meet the Man, he says, because "it is merely an unbelievable story of unbelievable violence." The other failure, according to Stern, is the title story, "Going to Meet the Man." It fails because it "attempts in an ingenuous way to equate a Southern white’s hatred for Negroes with his own sexual life. To make it a one- to-one relationship in which lust equals hate and vice versa is to reduce complexity to caricature," Dennis Donoghue also dismisses the story as a 42 "sadistic sexual fantasy." On the other side of the fence stands Michael Joseph, who praises the beautiful prose cadences in "Going to Meet the Man" and admires the story's mythic significance. He finds the story, in short, "powerful and persuasive fiction. The relationship between the actual murder witnessed in childhood and the pathetic man that it has spiritually murdered is developed with great subtleties of rhetoric and analysis. 70

Although Featherstone is not impressed with the title story, he praises "The Outing" and "Sonny’s Blues" for their objective point of view, for Baldwin’s artistic detachment. "The Outing," he says, is "a beautifully disciplined piece of writing. It was hard to know which to admire more, the ironic precision of the characters or the despairing eloquence with which Baldwin spells out a vision of their fate." In short, "it is an excellent story full of subtle feeling, precise observation and lyrical sympathy for all the people in Baldwin’s Harlem world." "Sonny’s Blues," says Feathers tone-, has some of the same qualities as "The Outing": "In these stories Baldwin has distinguished himself-from his characters." But he ranks "Sonny’s Blues" over any story in Going to Meet the Man, for it "achieves an almost Fitzgerald-like sweetness of tone." "Sonny’s Blues" has become Baldwin’s most popular story, if one measures its popularity by the number of times it 44 has been discussed and included in standard vzorks. Although Seymour Krim dislikes "Going to Meet the Man," which he considers a slice of agit-prop, so similar to Blues for Mister Charlie, he is pleased with "Sonny’s Blues" and the other stories in Going 71 to Meet the Man. He says that the craft and the feeling that went into the stories were hard won. "It is true that Baldwin's tone, at least in the present book, is somewhat milder and more muted than the bullets Claude Brown and LeRoi Jones are ostensibly spitting out, but since when did one or two writers' virtues replace equally valid concerns from another direction—a subtler kind of obsession, a more subjective handling of Negro Experience? This new book is gentle, but not soft." When Krim measures Baldwin's novels against his short stories, he concludes that the short fiction is superior in literary quality, and Baldwin should be proud of his achievement in the short story genre, because, "technically, the stories reveal an integrity to their experience that surprised and enlightened me after the embarrassing botch of Another Country; one forgets how hard Baldwin has worked to establish his sound, that particular signature of long and patient sentences that never hurry a moment when it should be sweetly tasted and have enough self-confidence in their leisureliness to envelop the reader instead of lightly touching him." J Krim's high opinion of Baldwin as a writer of short 72 fiction is topped with Daniel Stern’s: It is pleasant to be able to report that Going to Meet the Man, Baldwin’s first collection of sSorb storiesV is~closer in spirit, tone, and achievement to his best critical work than it is to his sensational fiction. These stories are beautifully made to frame genuine experience in a lyrical language. They are, for the most part, free from the intellectual sin of confusing the Negro’s (and/or the white man’s) tragedy with the homosexual’s psychic deformity. They sing with truth dug out from pain .... The stories demonstrate with stunning effect that James Baldwin has no need of racial or sexual special pleading, Free of these, at his best he is a rare creature. This survey of critical opinion reveals that Baldwin's reputation as a writer is uneven; he has had his peaks and valleys in the eyes of those who have applied certain literary standards to his works. He has been called everything from a well-disciplined and serious artist to a careless writer of popular, transient polemics. One gathers fertile soil, sand and moss from the mountain of critical reaction. From the book reviews (some carefully constructed and intelligent, others rather shoddy off-the-cuff 1 sputterings), and articles and essays (most reflect disciplined scholarship; a few are rather immature diatribes designed to injure, more than to offer constructive criticism), an intellectual and emotional 73 frequency can be discerned. What follows is an attempt to plot the curves of that frequency. To say that Baldwin is one of America’s most talented essayists is almost to entertain clichéd thought. That generalization has become an accepted fact, not a subject of debate among authorities in literature and language. That Nobody Knows My Name, Notes of a Native Son, and The Fire Next Time have brought the essay genre to a new level of excellence has become in literary circles. This writer feels that since The Fire Next Time Baldwin has taken his reputation as essayist for granted. No Name in the Street lacks the luster of his other collections of essays; it is not a well- constructed, thought-provoking book. Perhaps he has done this deliberately to attract more attention to himself as a novelist, for he wants to be recognized and remembered as a master of fiction, rather than as an essayist. According to this survey of critical appraisal, Baldwin's best novel is Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and his second best novel is If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), his first and last novel. Love for God and love between people is the universal theme 74 in both works. They are regarded as major works of art in Afro-American literature; ranked with non-black works, however, the novels would not get an excellent grade, but a good one. (Critics seem to bend principles a little when they evaluate black works of art; and it is mostly white critics whose voices are heard in this survey, for they are the ones who have written the most about Baldwin. Of course, it is obvious, and expected, that they used Euro-American literary standards, not the principles developed by the designers of the Black Aesthetic, to judge the works of black Baldwin. But to give a lengthy debate here would be a digression.) The point is that when Baldwin produces novels that are relatively free of political references and social protest, critics approve; for, as they see it, art and polemics, like crude oil and spring water, do not blend well. During the years between his first and last novel Baldwin's reputation undergoes a downward swing. Giovanni's Room (1956) outranks Another Country (1962) as a work of art. Generally white critics are not displeased with Baldwin’s handling of the homosexual theme, nor do they object to the cast of white characters. Conversely, black critics think that the 75

novel is an almost complete waste of talent, (Would it please black critics had the author made his homosexuals or bisexuals black? If he had, one suspects, it would have made bad matters worse, for then black critics would have accused the author of denigrating blackness.) At any rate, critical reaction is mixed concerning the artistic worth of the novel. With Another Country Baldwin's reputation as novelist suffers further decline. Critics complain that the structure is too chaotic, and critics vent their spleen over Baldwin's reversal of racial stereotypes. Written in the middle of his career as novelist, the novel dashed almost all hopes that Baldwin could fulfill his promise as a disciplined artist who could rise above polemics and create sympathetic, credible characters, rather than distorted images in documentary-like studies. Baldwin’s career as novelist bottomed-out with Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. Like Another Country, it is a novel with strong political implications; like Another Country, it was a popular best-seller, but extremely unpopular among white critics, mainly because it attacked prevailing 76 attitudes in the white community. Critics granted that portions of Train are effectively written, but failed it as a work of art. Consequently, they turned sour toward Baldwin; they became more skeptical than ever about his failure as novelist. Revolutionary black critics, like Cleaver, had advised Baldwin to "tell it like it is”; he took their advice and got the shaft from white critics for having done so. Create a human story that does not preach violence, and spit in our faces, white critics suggested. Remember what you said years ago about the distinction between sociology and art, they reminded him. Baldwin remembered and wrote If Beale Street Could Talk, and got approval, once more after twenty years, from critics, Baldwin’s career as novelist follows the same curve as his career as dramatist. Amen Corner is considered a better play than Blues for Mister Charlie, and for the same reasons that Go Tell It on the Mountain is considered superior to Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. The first play is a gentle piece with characters that talk, walk, and eat like real people; the second is an angry attack on injustice and America’s peculiar brand of racism. 77

The more you write for the theatre, the more you sound like protest writer Richard Wright, critics carped. Baldwin’s new play, One Day When I Was Lost (1973) and his yet-to-be published play Woman at the Well, if ever produced professionally, may give status to Baldwin as a competent dramatist. It is difficult to determine from the reviews of Going to Meet' the Man exactly where Baldwin stands as a writer of short fiction. If one takes the word of reviewers (but one doubts that book reviewers are to be relied upon totally, for some of their reviews reflect lack of comprehension of literal facts within the stories), "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" seems to be Baldwin’s best short story. It was published some three years before his second best story, "Sonny's Blues," although the latter story is the most often reprinted in anthologies. "Going to Meet the Man," like Blues for Mister Charlie and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone—all similar in theme and tone—is ranked as the least effective story, ■judged by accepted literary standards. The other stories fall somewhere between the two extremes; critics give a yea to some and a nay to a few; or they remain completely silent about the quality of most stories. 78

In short, the survey shows that Baldwin is regarded first and foremost as an essayist. He is viewed as a versatile yet controversial novelist, who ranks second place. Whether he is a better writer of short fiction than he is a dramatist is yet to be determined. Some critics suggest that Baldwin should turn to writing more plays and short stories because of his mastery of dramatic incidents and lively episodes, and because of his power to create vivid life-like scenes. 79 Notes

See Darwin T. Turner, comp., Afro-American Writers, Goldentree Bibliographies Series, "ed. ö. B. Hardison, Jr. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), 6, 29, 37, 78. o Russell G. Fisher, comp., "James Baldwin: A Bibliography, 1947-62," in Bulletin of Bibliography, 24 (1965), 127-30. Kathleen À. kindî7 comp. , James Baldwin: A Checklist, 1947-62," Bulletin of Bibliography, 24 (1965), 123-26. Fred’“£.“Standley, comp.. ’’James Baldwin: 1963-67,” Bulletin of Bibliography, 25 (1968), 135-36. “ * Fern Marja Eckman, The Furious Passage of James Baldwin (New York: Popular Library ,""1966). 4 Keneth Kinnamon, ed., James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays, Twentieth' Century Views, ed." MaynardTiack (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice- Hall, 1974). 5 Kinnamon, James Baldwin, p. 8. 6 Darwin T. Turner, ed., Black American Literature (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1970), p. 113. 7 John Thompson, "Baldwin: The Prophet as an Artist," in Commentary, 45 (June 1968), 67-69. 8 Theodore Gross, The Heroic Ideal in American Literature (New York: The Free Press,“Ï97T7, pp.

9 Theodore Gross and James A. Emmanuel, eds., Dark Symphony (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 298. Irving Howe, The Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World^ "1970), p"... Ï86''.’“ From an editorial. "Be the Best," in The Douglass Pilot (June 1938;; quoted in Fern Eckman•s Furious Passage, p. 47. 80 ip Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,“19657? p. 215. Christopher E. W, Bigsby, "The Committed Writer: James Baldwin as Dramatist." in Twentieth Century Literature, 13 (April 1967j, 39-457 Baldwin said this to Nat Hentoff; the interview was published in (April 11, 1965). John Simon, "Blues for Mister Baldwin," in Hudson Review, 17 (Autumn 1964), 421. Bigsby, "Committed Writer," p. 46. Walter Meserve, "James Baldwin's 'Agony Way,'" in The Black American Writer, ed. C. W. E. Bigsby (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971), "pp• 176, 178. T8 Bone, Negro Novel in America, pp. 215-39. ^■9 Joseph Peatherstone, "Blues for Mister Baldwin," in New Republic (November 27, 1965), p. 34. 20 Jay Saunders Redding, New York Herald Tribune Book Review (May 17, 19537, P* 5« 21 George Kent, "James Baldwin and the Problem of Being," in College Language Association Journal, 7 (1964), 213. po Granville Hicks, New York Times (October 14, 1956), p. 5« —— 25 william Esty, New Republic (December 17, 1965), p. 26. 24 Arthur P. Davis, Prom the Dark Tower (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press7“l974), p. 219. J Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968), p. 109. ’ 26 Bigsby, "The Committed Writer,” p. 40. 81

2? Gross, Dark Symphony, p. 298. 28 Gross, The Heroic Ideal, p. 167. 29 Dennis Donoghue, "Blues for Mister Baldwin," in New York Review, 5 (December 9, 1965), 6. Davis, Dark Tower, p. 220. Calvin C. Hernton, "A Fiery Baptism," in Amistad, 1 (1970), 200-14; rpt. Kinnamon, James Baldwin, pp. 109-19. ^2 Guy Davenport, National Review, 20 (July 16, 1968), 701. ’ : 55 Anon., Booklist, 70 (July 1, 1974), 1179.

Mary Silva Gosgrave, Hornbook, 50 (October 1974), 158. Arthur Carley, Library Journal, 99 (April 1, 1974), 1057. Ivan Webster, New Republic. 170 (June 15, 1974), 25-6. ------Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review (May 19, 1974), pp. 1-2',' Oates"r’"£pocalyptTc excess" is no doubt a reference to Irving Howe's "James Baldwin: At Ease in Apocalypse," a scathing review of Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone; his article appeared*"in~Earper's Magazine, 237 (September 1968), 92, 95-100, H owe Ts‘"review was later reprinted in Kinnamon’s James Baldwin, pp. 96-108. John V. Hagopian, "James Baldwin: The Black and the Red-White-and-Blue," in CLA Journal, 7 (December 1963), 133-40. Sam BlueTarb, ”James Baldwin’s ’Previous Condition’: A Problem of Identification," in Negro American Literary Forum, 3 (1969), 26-29. Elaine R. Ognibene, '"’Black Literature Revisited: ’Sonny's Blues,’" in English Journal, 60 (January 1971), 36-37. Seymour Krim, "The Troubles He’s Seen," in Bookweek, 3 (November 9, 1965), 5. 82 40 Dennis Donoghue, "Blues,” p. 5. Oscar Handlin, Atlantic Monthly, 216 (November 1965), 191. ^2 Daniel Stern, "A Special Corner on Truth," in Saturday Review (November 6, 1965), p. 32. Michael Joseph, "Love, 0 Sweet Love," in Times Literary Supplement (October 28, 1965), pp. 34-36. Joseph Featherstone, "Blues," p. 36. Seymour Krim, "Troubles," pp. 5, 19, 25. Krim is obviously referring to Claude Brown’s novel, Manchild in the Promised Land (1965); and LeRoi Jones* Dutchman ana' Slave? both published and produced in 1964? TEe novel and plays caused a stir around the country, to say the least. Daniel Stern, "Special Corner,” p. 32. 8$

Chapter 4

Tension Between a Black-Minister-Father and His Sons

Part of the story of Baldwin’s childhood and adolescent years spent in Harlem is recounted in several of his personal essays and articles, and some of the most significant incidents of those develop­ mental crises have been recreated in several of his semi-autobiographical works of fiction. In both his non-fictional accounts and his short stories the author shows the influence of the family and the church as they attempt to mold the personality of impressionable youngsters; the molding process of these important institutions is painful for both the author and his characters. The main confrontations in "The Rockpile," "Roy's Wound,*" "The Outing," and "The Death of the Prophet" grow out of the strict religious codes of the minister-father and his sons’ attempt to reject those principles. Although the central theme in each of the four stories is the estrangement between the minister-father and his sons, other related themes emerge. The important recurring thematic concerns are responsibility 84 for child-rearing, search for emotional security inside and outside the family, desire for freedom and adventure in the secular world, betrayal and deception of the minister-father, guilt growing out of living a sinful life, alienation from the saints, repentance for failure to honor the minister-father, and fear of eternal damnation of the soul. The various thematic concerns treated in each of the stories strongly suggest that Baldwin conceives of the short story as a form that centers on a significant unifying theme, contains a dramatic incident, but explores more than one theme. He does not believe in the theory that one story should contain one—and only one—theme. The stories depict * life as a continuing process in which the characters find no easy answers to their problems; they become more aware of themselves and the motivation of others, but their problems are not resolved by the end of the stories. Through their experiences they become aware of alternative ways of thinking and behaving, but never do they completely break with the codes of their elders. ’’The Rockpile” (1965), "Roy’s Wound" (1952), "The Outing" (1951), and "The Death of the Prophet" 85

(1950) form what might be called a Bildungsroman—a fictional narrative about the physical and psychological development of Johnnie Grimes, the central character and central consciousness in each story. As treated in this chapter, the Bildungsroman follows a flashback structure; it traces the formation of Johnnie’s character from the age of eight or nine to eighteen. The four stories suggest some of the causes of the estrangement between the children and the author’s stepfather, Reverend David Baldwin, whose life ended ironically: ’’Maybe he saved a lot of souls, but he lost all his children.1’^ Reverend

Baldwin's fictional counterpart in these four stories is Reverend Gabriel Grimes; while James Baldwin’s fictional self is portrayed by Johnnie. Does Gabriel Grimes, like David Baldwin, alienate himself from his children? If so, what are some of the causes and effects of the estrangement? The answer to the first question is affirmative. Because Gabriel assumes the role of a prophet and a dominant authority figure, and attempts to assume the role of the Old Testament Jehovah figure, who is above all human beings, who intimidates them, who rules, judges and punishes the transgressors of his law, who 86 punishes one law-breaker and pardons another, his sons cannot love him as a human being who is compassionate, understanding, forgiving, and affectionate. The sons feel threatened by their father’s god-like authority and rebel against him. Gabriel’s demands eventually drive his sons out of the home, the church, and the community. In "The Rockpile" one sees the early effects of Gabriel’s demand for strict and absolute obedience on o his sons. In his attempt to protect his children from the corruption of the outside, sinful world—which in the story is represented by the "wicked" streets of Harlem, the rockpile, the locale of numerous gang wars between neighborhood youth, and the Harlem River, a potentially dangerous body of water which has taken the life of Richard, a young boy—Gabriel’s purpose is to shield his children from the spiritual corruption of their souls and the risk of physical injury or death. While he is away from the home at work, his wife, Elizabeth, also a Christian lady, is held responsible for protecting her children; and she, too, believes in isolating her children from the hostile world. 87

As the story opens two brothers are sitting on the fire-escape which joins their small Harlem apartment. The fire-escape, located between the world of authority and restraint (which is represented by the mother who is inside the apartment) and the world of freedom and experience (which is -symbolized by the rockpile) is the observation deck; it is the middle world that allows the brothers to choose between compliance with the strict religious laws of the parents, or rejection of parental standards. As a responsible mother, Elizabeth has locked the front door of the family’s home and has warned her sons of the risks of playing with the unsaved and aggressive children: ”It’s a wonder they don’t kill themselves," their mother said, watching sometimes from the fire- escape. "You children stay away from there [the rockpile'3 you hear me?" Though she said ’children’ she was looking at Roy, where he sat beside John on the fire-escape. "The good Lord knows," she continued, "I don't want you to come home bleeding like a hog every day the Lord sends." (9) Not only does the mother's admonition to her children in the above passage foreshadow Roy’s injury, but the scene that follows that warning suggests that Roy’s fate may eventually parallel the tragedy of Richard, who, out of the view of his parents, was drowned in the Harlem River. 8Q

The difference between the two Grimes brothers is reflected in their reactions to the warning of their mother and the short memory scene on Richard’s drowning. Johnnie, the older brother, a frail, timid introvert, remains on the fire-escape not only because of his mother’s directive, but because he fears the aggressive children who play violent games on the rockpile below. Like Baldwin, Johnnie is a sensitive, perceptive, lonely, and obedient youngster who feels secure in the presence of his mother; he shares with his mother the responsibility—and the burden—of rearing his younger half brothers and sisters, and, like his mother, is the object of Gabriel’s scorn and contempt when Roy, Gabriel’s natural son, gets into trouble. While Gabriel is at work, Johnnie is charged with the responsibility of protecting the family’s younger members, a role Sister McCandless points out: "You’s the man of the house, you supposed to look after your baby brothers and sisters—you ain’t supposed to let them run off and get half-killed” (14). Although Johnnie has been given adult responsibilities, and he attempts to carry out the demands of his parents, he is yet a child and has 89 interests that are not connected with child-rearing. Even though he has been confined to the fire-escape, and he is told to keep his brother there by bis side, Johnnie avoids the restlessness and boredom of Roy through reading and drawing. Unlike Soy, who finds excitement in the outside challenge of the rockpile and longs to explore and conquer it, Johnnie seeks to discover the hidden mystery of a new electric locomotive engine, featured in a newspaper advertisement. In Johnnie's Interest in drawing we see the young artist who first imitates reality; he is more concerned with vicarious experience than with the lived experiences of the rockpile. Feeling affection for his brother and having a sense of responsibility for his brother's safety, Johnnie recognizes Roy's need to explore the natural world, and allows him to leave the fire-escape upon Roy's promise to return within five minutes. When Johnnie becomes so engrossed in his reproduction of art, though, he forgets for a few minutes to keep an eye on his brother on the rockpile. His commitment to his art has caused him to fail to carry out his delegated responsibility of protecting his brother. As Baldwin perceives the artist, he is one who observes 90 the activities of people, and has an interest in their survival, but he must remain apart from—on the fire-escape, as it were—the chaos of the live-a-day world. Unlike Johnnie, the artist-observer of human activity, Roy’s image is that of the elan vital, the participant in living, the defiant, bold, adventuresome child. Roy is willing to risk the possibility of injury or death in the rockpile world of lived experience. The rockpile to him is a strange and mysterious microcosm which he must enter, explore, and capture. Although he knows that his father will return home within the hour and will end his and Johnnie’s freedom (Gabriel will not allow Johnnie to continue reading and drawing, for the father feels that such activity is a waste of time and will ultimately corrupt the mind of his son, and Gabriel will certainly restrain Roy from leaving the apartment) Roy takes the chance of entering the forbidden world when he unlocks the apartment door and goes downstairs to play with his peers, ”Roy felt it to be his right, not to say his duty, to play” on the rockpile; clearly this desire reflects his bold defiance of the confinement imposed by his parents. 91

When Roy engages in the battle over the occupation of the rockpile, emerges at the top of it as the conqueror, is injured, and is carried home by Sister McCandless, it is not contempt for his peers that he feels, hut fear of the consequences of that experience! he may have to suffer at the hands of his father, whom he fears. When his father returns home full of anger and vengeance because the mother and the elder son have failed to keep Roy, "Daddy’s little man"—his favorite son^ who is not held responsible for his own actions—Roy closes his eyes, attempting to avoid the reality of Gabriel’s wrath toward his mother and Johnnie. One would expect that a minister-father would be a reasonable man who values truth and absolute honesty; but, ironically, Gabriel, who is only a common laborer outside of the home, when he enters the door of his home transforms himself into a wrathful god-like figure who does not want to listen to the story of human error from those held responsible for the conduct of the law-breaker, Roy. Instead of placing the responsibility of misconduct on Roy, Gabriel first turns to Johnnie and demands to know what has happened to his natural son, Roy. Gabriel becomes a "barking 92 4 dog” who paralyzes Johnnie with fear. Although Johnnie, the observer-artist, knows the truth about the incident, his demanding critic-father intimidates him so that Johnnie's tongue freezes. Although Elizabeth fears her emotional, questioning husband, who faults her for not calling a doctor to examine Roy's wound, and insults her by saying that she lacks intelligence, she manages to gain enough courage to tell the truth about Roy's rockpile experience. He went downstairs . . . where he didn't have no business to be, and got to fighting with them bad boys playing on that rockpile .... Ain't nothing wrong with my eyes that I can’t tell whether he's hurt bad or not. He got a fright more'n anything else, and you ought to pray God it teaches him a lesson.(16-17) Instead of facing the reality of Roy's history of ignoring his mother, brother, and father's orders to i remain in the house away from the sinners in the streets of Harlem, Gabriel reminds Elizabeth of her sin of bringing into the world a bastard child— Johnnie—and strongly suggests that she does not share the same affection for Roy as she does for her first child. When Gabriel threatens to "take a strap” to Johnnie for permitting Roy to go to the rockpile, Elizabeth retorts boldly: 93

Gabriel, ain’t no sense in trying to blame Johnnie. You know right well if you have trouble making Roy behave, he ain’t going to listen to his brother. He don’t hardly listen to me ... . You ain't going to take no strap to this boy, not today you ain't. Ain't a soul to blame for Roy's lying up there now but you—you because you done spoiled him so that he thinks he can do just anything and get away with it. I'm here to tell you that ain't no way to raise no child. You don’t pray to the Lord to help you do better than you been doing, you going to live to shed bitter tears that the Lord don’t take his soul today, (18) Although Gabriel knows that Elizabeth has repented for her sins of the past, he has never forgiven her, and has continued to punish her and the fruit of her sin, Johnnie. But Gabriel has never been able to face his own short-comings and the weaknesses of his rebellious son, Roy. His only reaction to the realities of his own life is to cast blame on others by either wishing to punish them severely or hoping for their destruction. Elizabeth sees in Gabriel’s face his contempt for her questioning his "absolute" authority: She looked back at Gabriel, who had risen* who stood near the sofa, staring at her. And she found in his face not fury alone, which would not have surprised her; but hatred so deep as to become insupportable in its lack of personality. His eyes were struck alive, unmoving, blind with malevolence—she felt, like the pull of the earth at her feet, his longing to witness her perdition.(18) "The Rockpile" may be interpreted as an ironic folk-parable in which Gabriel, the stern, unreasonable, 94 aggressive, father-god figure, attempts to play the role of a super-human omnipotent judge; he demands more of his wife and family than does Christ of those who have broken the laws of the old-testament prophets. His choice of Roy, the law-breaker, as the favored child, and his rejection of Johnnie, the obedient, humble child, springs from the blood relationship only—not from approved character traits—thus, such a choice is, indeed, ironic. His threatening behavior toward his stepson and his insulting statements to his wife cause tension and alienation in the family. When his conceptof himself as god who refuses to listen to the reasonable arguments is questioned, he becomes furious and condemns the souls of the defiant ones to hell. Johnnie’s silent curses against Gabriel in “The Rockpile” become Roy’s expressed curse in "Roy’s Wound,a sketch which dramatizes the tensions caused by the father’s injustice. In the story Roy has returned home with a knife wound which was inflicted by a white boy who fought against a black gang. As the story opens Johnnie is returning home from the forbidden movie house; he learns of his brother’s injury and knows that Gabriel will blame him for not 95 being home to care for Roy. When the rejected, bastard-son enters the family apartment and looks into his father’s face, he knows that his father would prefer Johnnie, rather than Roy, to have been wounded. Not out of any hatred for his brother, but out of contempt for his father, Johnnie, for a moment, hopes that Roy will die, for this would fulfill his mother’s prophecy, and "bring his father low” (39). From Gabriel's sister, Florence, we learn that Gabriel's childhood parallels Roy's. Gabriel as a youngster was carried home several times "more dead than alive." His mother was unable to discipline him; "she wore herself out heating on you, just like you been wearing yourself out beating on this boy here .... You better stop trying to blame everything on Elizabeth and look to your own wrong­ doings," (42) Florence advises. Florence is not the only one who despises Gabriel's unjust criticism of Elizabeth, who he claims has failed to be a responsible mother. Roy, "the apple of his father's eye," as in "The Rockpile," refuses to respond positively to his father's pampering; for Roy believes that his father is "a crazy man" who will not -listen to sound reasoning and hates to be 96 reminded of his own sinful behavior in the past. Not only does Gabriel refuse to accept the truth about his own stubbornness, but he cannot bear to hear the truth about his mirror-image, Roy. Elizabeth bears witness to the true character of Roy: You know right well . . • -that Johnny don't travel with the same class of boys as Roy goes with. You done beat Roy too many times, here, in this very room for going out with them bad boys. Roy got hisself hurt this afternoon because he was out doing something he didn’t have no business doing, and that’s the end of it. You ought to be thanking your Redeemer he ain’t dead .... You ain’t got but one child . ; . that’s liable to go out and break his neck, and that’s Roy, and you know it. And I don’t know how in the world you expect me to run this house, and look after these children, and keep running around the block after Roy. No I can’t stop him. I done told you that, ancTyou can’t stop him neither. You don't know what to do with this boy, and that's why you aDTthe time trying to fix-the blame on somebody. Ain't nobody to blame, Gabriel. You better pray God to stop "him before somebody puts another knife in him and puts him in his grave. (42-43) As in "The Rockpile" Gabriel, the bread-winner- father-god, transforms himself into a creature of violence whenever he is challenged by his sister and wife; although he threatens to slap his sister, he fears it because she says that she will defend herself physically; but in his fury he slaps Elizabeth in an effort to silence her. His act of violence against their mother elicits contempt in the eyes of Sarah, 97

his younger daughter, makes real the deep-seated hatred in Johnnie’s face, and motivates Roy, who has hidden his contempt for his father all along, to express his hatred openly: “Don’t you slap my mother. That’s my mother. You slap her again, you black bastard, and I swear to God I’ll kill you" (4-3). With Roy’s curse and threat, Gabriel’s alienation from his children becomes complete. He has desired Elizabeth’s destruction before, but now he goes into a tantrum and tries to destroy by a severe beating the son who has betrayed him; he becomes so violent in whipping Roy that Florence has to restrain Gabriel by catching the belt and holding it. In Elizabeth's trying to comfort Roy, it is clear that Roy's affection for his mother is strong and real. His mother rushed over to the sofa and caught Roy in her arms, crying as John had never seen a woman, or anybody, cry before. Roy caught his mother around the neck and held on to her as though he were drowning. (4-4-) It is Elizabeth's love and compassion for her children that will save the family from total disintegration. While she seeks to the family unit around the concept of a shared responsibility for its survival, Gabriel causes disunity and contempt by pardoning 98 the behavior of Roy, and blaming others for that child’s own lack of self-responsibility. g "The Outing” dramatizes the covert and overt rebellion of Johnnie and Roy against their father and the Christian church in which he serves as a deacon. The strict religious principles which he has tried to impose on them in the home are the same molding doctrines used by the fundamentalist church, which attempts to suppress the natural instincts of those reared in the religious-oriented home. If the adolescents adopt the life-style of the so-called saint, then they will, until death, have to play the role of obedient, submissive children, and cannot assert their natural need to become men who defend themselves against the hostile world. Furthermore, once the adolescents accept and practice the rigid laws of the established church, they will be prohibited from fulfilling their own sexual drives outside the bond of marriage. Although the expressed purpose of the outing, the annual picnic of the Mount of Olives Pentecostal Assembly, as announced by Father James, is to give "the children of God a day of relaxation; to breathe a purer air and to worship God joyfully beneath the roof of 99 heaven,” (21) Johnnie and Roy Grimes, and their friend David Jackson go on the trip mainly to gratify their sexual needs. Roy's attraction is divided between Elizabeth and Sylvia; David, who has some sexual interest in Johnnie, is mainly interested in winning Sylvia's affection; and Johnnie, who realizes during the trip that he is not really attracted to Sylvia sexually, wishes to draw David closer to him in love. Although Roy has recently joined the church, he is honest enough to reveal to his sinner-peers that he has not been converted. He finds humor in his deception of his father and boasts, ”1 got a Daddy-made salvation. I'm saved when I'm with Daddy” (27). When he suggests that Sylvia's birthday gift should be underwear, he does this not to embarrass Sylvia, but to spite her "great, rawboned, outspoken” mother Sister Daniels, who is one of the pillars of the church in which his father serves as a deacon. Roy enjoys his role as a trouble-maker because it is a way of showing his contempt for his father. Much of the humor in "The Outing” centers around Roy's boasting of his manhood, his profanity ("It's a bitch”—he means having to live under his father's authority), and his implied sexual approach to Elizabeth (”Roy!” Elizabeth giggled, 100

"Roy Grimes. If you ever say a thing like that again"). As a young hoy Roy "ain’t homesick for heaven yet" and can hardly wait until he becomes a man. Only by betraying his father and seeking experience in the secular world, Roy feels, can he achieve his own identity and freedom from imposed restrictions. "The Outing" also reveals Johnnie’s attempt to attain selfhood. He has determined that he can no longer contain his contempt for his father, who constantly singles him out as a scapegoat. Although Gabriel knows that he brought Roy along on the outing to keep him from getting into trouble in the city, Gabriel tells Johnnie to behave himself, (Such a disciplinary warning is highly ironic because Johnnie has a reputation of being a well-behaved boy.) Unlike Roy, who openly cursed his father in "Roy's Wound," Johnnie restrains himself, although "He wanted at once to shout to his father the most dreadful curses that he knew and he wanted to weep." Instead of cursing his father, Johnnie, with much asperity, fury and hatred in his voice, uses sarcasm: "Don’t worry about me, Daddy. Roy’ll see to it that I behave" (26). For the first time Johnnie challenges his father. "He looked up into his father’s face with an anger 101 which surprised and even frightened him. But he did not drop his eyes, knowing that his father saw there (and he wanted him to see it) how much he hated him." As in the other stories discussed heretofore, Gabriel feels that he should knock Johnnie down, but he cannot become violent in the "presence of saints and strangers." (He must appear as a holy man of compassion and understanding in their presence.) But Gabriel does threaten to "pull down those long pants" and show Johnnie who the real man of the house is. Aggressive, manly behavior—other than that shown by Gabriel—becomes a forbidden act in the Grimes family. Johnnie seems willing to challenge his father’s aggressiveness; "yes we will" determine who is the man, Johnnie thinks to himself. In a brief scene later on in the story the reader becomes aware of Gabriel’s hatred for Johnnie. Gabriel reminds Elizabeth that Johnnie, the "proud demon," is her bastard child, and advises her to "talk with Johnnie." Not only does Gabriel continue to punish Elizabeth for her sin, but he also desires the death of her son: "Be the best thing in the world if the Lord would take his soul." That's what Gabriel 102 honestly feels; but "he had meant to say to save his soul" (31). Surrounded by church members, who try to persuade him to receive Christ and accept salvation, Johnnie feels guilt. For Johnnie (who is sexually attracted to David Jackson, a handsome, masculine teenager) to be saved and accepted centers on his achieving a mutual relationship in love. The risk involved in committing oneself totally to the beloved is described by Baldwin in metaphorical language. In the copper sunlight, Johnnie felt suddenly not the presence of the Lord, but the presence of David; which seemed to reach out to him, hand reaching out to hand in the fury of -time, to drag him to the bottom of the water or to carry him safe to shore. Johnnie's passion for David, who has the power to destroy or rescue his lover emotionally, is so intense that Johnnie wishes to acknowledge publicly his love. From the corner of his eye he watched his friend, who held him with such power; and felt, for that moment, such a depth of love, such a nameless and terrible joy and pain, that he might have fallen, in the face of that company, weeping at David's feet.(41) Although he may have engaged in homosexual affairs in the past, David on the day of the outing definitely has more interest in Sylvia than he does in Johnnie. Even though he stands beside Johnnie during 103 the church services and spends a few minutes with him on Bear Mountain, most of David's day is spent in his attempt to catch Sylvia alone in order to present to her a gold-plated butterfly pin, which he, Roy, and Johnnie purchased as a birthday gift. Even though David says that Sylvia is "crazy" about him, he knows that she is Elisha's girlfriend. The advantage that Elisha has over David is that Elisha is a Christian, and Sylvia prefers association with the saved ones. When David gives Sylvia the butterfly pin, she says that nothing would satisfy her more than to see David a member of the church, and declares that she will never speak to him again if he does not attend revival services. David is willing to attend church services in order to win Sylvia’s attention. The birthday present, the beautiful but inexpensive gold-plated butterfly pin, which Roy says will turn Sylvia's clothes green, symbolizes the heterosexual love relationships of adolescents. Physical attraction may be the only basis of initial contacts and pursuits of adolescents, but further associations may reveal the inner character of sexual partners; then they will have to deal with each other’s biases and . Like the gold-plated butterfly 104 pin, an inanimate object suggesting the beginning (spring) stage of growth, the heterosexual relationship is socially acceptable, is likely to be more permanent than a homosexual affair, but is not without human problems• In contrast to the butterfly pin, Baldwin places the Image of the flower emerging from its bud in spring. In the last paragraph of "The Outing," Baldwin suggests that the homosexual affair between Johnnie and David will probably not endure as long as the "butterfly pin. The events of the day cause Johnnie to feel that his dream of a lasting love-bond may not be fulfilled. All during the trip home David seemed preoccupied. When he finally sought out Johnnie he found him sitting by himself on the top deck, shivering a little in the night air. He sat down beside him. After a moment Johnnie moved and put his head on David’s shoulder. David put his arms around him. But now where there had been peace, there was only panic, and where there had been safety, danger, like a flower, opened.(47) Unlike the heterosexual relationship, the homosexual affair usually is a short-lived, fragile, and frustrating experience; this is especially true of adolescent relationships, for that period of develop­ ment involves a re-evaluation of social standards and a search for identity. 105

(The tension growing out of the homosexual lover and his heterosexual beloved not only is one of the themes in "The Outing," but is also one of the subtle themes treated in "The Man Child," which deals with the conflicts of adults, rather than the tensions of adolescents. A discussion of the parallels between the homosexual/heterosexual sub-theme in both stories follows in the next chapter.) Unable to establish a genuine human-to-human relationship with their minister-father, who favors Roy and rejects Johnnie, the sons of Gabriel search for emotional security and sexual fulfillment outside of the home and church. While Roy turns to Elizabeth (a young "saint" who has the same name that his mother has), and admires Sylvia (another "saint"), Johnnie seeks to fulfill his spiritual and sexual needs in his relationship with David (who has the name of Baldwin’s step-father and younger half-brother). The attractions of the Grimes brothers and the names given to the character on whom their attention centers, suggests that they have neither totally rejected the principles of the Christian church, nor their parents. What they have rejected is the image of the church 106 member as a creature who attempts to deny the natural instincts In man. Although Reverend David Baldwin considers himself one of the vessels of Christ, his cruelty at home and his arrogance in the pulpit disqualify him from being the Christian servant who embodies the ethos of the black church, which Baldwin finds "very exciting" in its rituals. He writes It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somewhat triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depth of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord .... Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, "the Word"—when the Church and I were one./

The scene in "The Outing" depicting the church service may strike a reader who is not familiar with the intensity and frenzy of the Pentecostal church as rather humorous, but Baldwin faithfully and seriously recreates an authentic religious service. Father James’ short but emotionally moving sermon, Elisha’s 107

simple but powerful testimony and transfiguration (he becomes an archetypal black man who dances to ageless and timeless rhythms), and the holy-dancing of Sylvia and others—all reflect Baldwin’s admiration, not ridicule, of the power and beauty of the fundamentalist church experience. Although both Baldwin and the central character in this Bildungsroman rebel against the minister-father figure and the Christian God, neither is able to erase the influences of David Baldwin or Gabriel Grimes, or the Christian God. In "The Rockpile,” "Roy’s Wound," and "The Outing," the reader witnesses the fear, contempt, and bitterness between Gabriel and Johnnie, 8 but in "The Death of the Prophet" one sees Johnnie as an eighteen-year-old who is being initiated into manhood. "The Death of the Prophet" is developed through memory scenes. As Johnnie goes to visit his dying father in a Long Island hospital, he remembers walking with his father to church on Sundays, Like Baldwin, who was, as a child, "frightened of all those brothers and sisters of the church because they were all-powerful," Johnnie as a youngster "was frightened and troubled at church; he did not doubt that the 108 gospel his father preached, to which the church bore witness, was the truth; that under of His everlasting was all love and all power and the assured redemption of his soul” (257)« But although Johnnie believes in the promise of a fulfilled life in Heaven, he can only see the poverty, deprivation, and degradation of black people in his community. Frustrated by the living conditions of his family in the Harlem ghetto, Johnnie, in the presence of his father, accuses the Christian God of being the white man’s partner in the dehumanization of black people, and fights "to be free of his father and his father’s God, now so crushingly shapeless and omnipotent, Who had come out of Eden and Jerusalem and Africa to sweeten the cotton field and make endurable the lash, and Who now hovered, like the promise of mercy, above the brutal Northern streets" (258). Consistent with his emotional behavior in the other stories, Gabriel "stripped him CJohnnieJ naked and beat him until he lay on the splintery floor in feverish sobbing and in terror of death." This whipping, like the one given to Roy in "Roy’s Wound," creates bitterness in Johnnie and motivates acts of rebellion. 109

Open non-conformity is reflected in Johnnie’s smoking and using profanity—direct violations of the principles of his minister-father. Further acts of rebellion are seen in Johnnie's establishing a friendship with David, a Jewish youngster, and going to the forbidden movie houses with him. Although Johnnie knows that his father forbids whites to visit the family’s apartment, Johnnie deliberately brings David home with him. When Gabriel discovers that David is Jewish—a non-Christian—Johnnie sees in his father’s expression the feeling of betrayal: His father locked on him with that distant hatred with which one considers Judas: and yet with more than that, for, his father’s eyes told him, he was henceforth damned by his own wish, having forsaken the few righteous to make his home in the populous Sodom and enter into an alliance with his father's enemies and the enemies of the Lord.(258) (Like Gabriel, David Baldwin often warned his step-son against associating with white people. In Notes Baldwin says that Reverend Baldwin "warned me that my white friends in high school were not really my friends and that I would see, when I was older, how white people would do anything to keep a Negro down. Some of them could he nice, he admitted, but none of them were to be trusted and most of them were not even nice. 110

The best thing was to have as little to do with them as possible. I did not feel this way and I was 9 certain, in my innocence, that I never would.” ) Other parallels are obvious between the Grimes and Baldwin : David Baldwin held the same against the author's Jewish friends, and Emile Capouya, as Gabriel Grimes had for David, the Jew; Reverend Baldwin believed that reading undermined his son's religious faith and forbade the reading of non-biblical literature, while Reverend Grimes objected strongly to Johnnie's reading secular literature; both Emma Baldwin and Elizabeth Grimes were ill during the last days of David and Gabriel, their husbands, and the mothers, feeling that death was soon to come to their mates, pleaded with James and Johnnie to visit their father, who was a patient in a Long Island hospital; both David and Gabriel were victims of and paranoia. In "The Death of the Prophet" the narrator commented, "He David Baldwin refused to eat because he said that his family was trying to poison him.”^ During his illness, David Baldwin refused food at home. And the final similarity between the autobiographical and fictional accounts is that both James Baldwin and Ill

Johnnie Grimes left home as adolescents because they did not want to see the ruin of their father, whom they had grown ambivalent toward. Biographer Fern Eckman wrote this about Baldwin’s attitude toward his ill stepfather: Now, witnessing the collapse of his stepfather, for so many years the of his life, a symbol of indestructibility, of terror and superhuman might, Jimmy Baldwin was obsessed by flight. He could not bear to see the proud, black man crumbling into ruin. . • . From the havoc of demolition, he ran away. He thought only of escaping from Harlem, but he was also trying to preserve his godlike image of his father—and his hate against the desecration of pity.11 James Baldwin left home at seventeen; Johnnie Grimes, like the author, moved away from home and went to live among his white friends in Greenwich Village when he was sixteen. On July 28, 1943, a day before David Baldwin’s death, James Baldwin, along with his father’s sister, visited Reverend Baldwin, a mental patient at Central Islip Hospital on Long Island. The author recalled that experience and his feelings: The moment I saw him I knew why I had put off this visit so long. I told my mother that I did not want to see him because I hated him. But this was not true. It was only that I had hated him and I wished to hold on to this hatred. I did not want to look on him as a ruin: it was not a ruin I had hated. I imagine that one of the reasons people cling 112

to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once the hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. ... Between pity and guilt and fear, I began to feel that there was another me trapped in my skull like a jack-in-the-box, who might escape my control at any moment and fill the air with screaming.

Although Baldwin, when he looked upon his father’s shriveled and still body, wanted to scream, "wanted to take his hand, to say something," he restrained himself. The inner feelings of Baldwin were expressed by his aunt, "who began to cry the moment she entered the hospital room," and by Johnnie, who not only pities his father but expresses the anguish openly. Like Baldwin, Johnnie has long waited for the day of his father’s death, has longed for this day because it will free him of his father’s authority. Just a moment before Gabriel’s death, Johnnie realizes that he will have to assume the responsibilities of manhood. It was his father that he watched dying; and no more would this violent man possess him; his arm would never be raised again. The ragged edge of sound which now issued from the throat would be silence soon or singing behind the far-flinged stars. Now he was the man, the conqueror, alone on the tilting earth• With Johnnie’s new freedom comes the awesome responsibility of struggling alone in the world, and 113 finding a moral center of his own. When Gabriel dies, finally, Johnnie remembers the lessons that his father taught in the pulpit and at home about soul salvation and damnation. Although Johnnie has cursed his father and his father’s God, he has never doubted the conviction of a Judgment Day. When Gabriel, Johnnie's god-like father, dies, Johnnie suddenly realizes that "communication, forgiveness, deliverance ... the hope" of eternal life in Heaven are no longer possible. He cannot face the possibility of damnation, and reverts to a childhood state. He felt thrown without mercy into everlasting ; or as though some door on which he had been knocking with all his weight had been, without warning, rudely opened; and now, like a two-year-old, he sprawled on his face and belly and burning knees, into an unfamiliar room, screaming with that unutterably astounded, apocalyptic terror of a child • • . . He wanted to run, to hide, to run out of the world and he forever hidden; but the hands were holding him, a white face over­ whelmed him, shooting out gray-green lights like signals for his destruction. He beat against the whiteness until his arms seemed bleeding in their sockets.(260) Even though Johnnie has attempted to reject the religious philosophy of his father, and has tried to assimilate into the predominantly white world, at the end of the story he comes to realize that he cannot erase the deep religious impressions established during 114 his childhood, and that the white world, as his father has taught him, may eventually prevent his normal development as a black man. At the end of the story Johnnie gathers his father's clothes, and leaves the hospital, believing that his own damnation and destruction are inevitable. On his way back home, Johnnie watches the "fanged and evil" moon, which is an omen portending the eternal damnation of his soul. The story does not end with a resolution of Johnnie's inner conflict, but Baldwin seems to suggest through the childhood image that Johnnie can become a man only when he reconstructs his own religious philosophy and social attitudes. To hold on to the beliefs of the prophet-father-god results in guilt and condemnation. With the death of the god-figure, Johnnie is free to create his own religious philosophy, but, in the story, he does not make that step. The Bildungsroman ends ironically. The son that despised his father most ends up visiting him in the hospital and accepting his father’s values. The favorite son, Roy, has cursed and betrayed his father, and leaves him to die alone among strangers—the white hospital staff, and the alienated son, Johnnie. 115

Gabriel, who is an offspring of slaves, becomes the cruel overseer of his children, and the unforgiving husband. Although he has forbidden smoking, drinking, cursing, and movie going, his sons end up doing those things to spite him. Although he has worked and put bread on the table for his family, during his illness he believes that his wife and children are trying to poison him. And irony of all ironies, although Gabriel has hated and rejected the white world all of his life, it is the white world that kept him alive by providing him jobs, and by providing medical and psychiatric care for him during his last two years of life on earth. What the reader must remember about the four stories treated in this section is that they are all told from the point of view of Johnnie, who has a strong bias against his father, just as Baldwin had for his father until David Baldwin’s death. One never enters the mind of Gabriel Grimes in the stories; one does not see him at work during the week, or see him struggling to provide for his family by working part of his weekends to keep food on the table and clothes on the backs of his children. The reader sees Gabriel only as a stern father who has a love-hatred 116 for his wife and stepson, and who expresses affection toward Roy. Just as the reader cannot fully under­ stand the motivations of Gabriel, Baldwin did not understand the behavior of his stepfather until Reverend David Baldwin’s death. After David Baldwin’s death, James Baldwin, with the threat forever removed, became sympathetic and forgiving. In Notes Baldwin recalls the days that he went to church with his stepfather and sat on his knee. At his father’s funeral Baldwin remembers, "how proud my father had been of me when I was little. Apparently I had a voice and my father had liked to show me off before the members of the church. I had forgotten what he had looked like when he was pleased but now I had remembered that he had always been grinning with IP pleasure when my solos ended." Like Gabriel in "The Rockpile" and "Roy's Wound," David Baldwin had tender moments with his family. Although he was often demanding and protective, "he loved his children," and he loved and respected his wife, Emma, whom he often teased. In Notes Baldwin writes that his mother and his father's sister deeply loved David Baldwin. "He had not always been cruel. I remember being taken for a haircut and scraping my 117 knee on the front of the barber’s chair, and I remember my father's face as he soothed my crying and applied the stinging iodine."3"^ (But in the stories it is

Roy, not Johnnie—the author's alter-ego—who is pampered by his father.) One of the most emotionally moving scenes in Eckman’s Furious Passage concerns the moment of concern and tenderness that James Baldwin felt for his stepfather: Always remote as a mystic communing on a mountain top, David Baldwin now seemed more dazed than awesome. One night, on his way from work, he stepped off the subway and sat down on a bench in the station at 135th Street and Lexington Avenue, lost in some never-never land of his own, until his stepson, coming in search of him, coaxed him to his feet and, half supporting him, led him home.12*" Instead of depicting episodes of tenderness, Baldwin has chosen to dramatize incidents of tension between the self-righteous minister-father and his rebellious sons. The irony that pervades all four stories grows out of the patriarch’s forceful attempt to unify his family around strict religious principles, but his efforts culminate in his estrangement from his children. In "The Rockpile" the sons fear their wrathful father and grow more ambivalent toward him— even Roy rejects his father’s doting attention; in 118

"Roy’s Wound" the father's violence toward the mother motivates Roy’s curse and reinforces John’s contempt for his father; in "The Outing" Roy betrays his father, deceives him by pretending to be a convert in harmony with the church, while John desires to curse his father in the presence of church members; and in "The Death of the Prophet" Roy, now completely estranged from his father, refuses to visit his dying father, while John, who has run away from home, returns with contempt and guilt in his heart to his father a stranger and seeks for the first time an understanding of his father’s motivations and desires his father’s forgiveness for transgressions, but too late to hear his dying father’s voice. The semi-autobiographical stories all center on the stern father as a major factor in the coming of age of his sons. The confrontations in their home motivate the sons to search for an alternative philosophy of life and different experiences in the secular world; this search is a prerequisite for maturity and autonomy in our modern adult society. The Bildungsroman ends with the sons beginning to explore the external world in search for identity and emotional security—a theme that is universal and eternal. 119

Notes

■*" Quoted in Fern Eckman's The Furious Passage of James Baldwin (New York: Popular"Xxbrary7^9S6')', p. 85. 2 • ' ■ James Baldwin, "The Rockpile," in Going to Meet the Man (New York: Dell, 1965)* pp. 9-19. ¡Subsequent references to this story will appear parenthetically in the text of this chapter. Reverend David Baldwin's favorite son was Sam. Some of the conflicts between Sam and his father are related in No Name in the Street (New York: Dial Press, 1972), pp. 7-9. Perhaps^Sam is the prototype for Roy, both considered the "apple of the father's eye." * "When he (David Baldwin] took one of his children on his knee to play, the child always became fretful and began to cry; when he tried to help one of us with our homework, the absolutely unabating tension which emanated from him caused our minds and our tongues to become paralized, so that he, scarcely knowing why, was punished',”' writes James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son, pp. 87-38. "Roy's Wound" first appeared in New World Writing, Vol. 2 (New York: New American ZZErary, 1952), pp,” 109-16. The sketch was an excerpt, a dramatic incident, from Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), PP* 36-40; page numbers in HieText re?er to the novel. The parallels between characters and events suggest that "Roy's Wound" was revised to form "The Rockpile." 6 Originally published in New Story (April 1951), 52-81, "The Outing" was reprinted in Going to Meet the Man (1965), pp. 20-47. Quotations in. the text refer To the anthology. ? James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dell, 1963), pp. 49-50.~ Q James Baldwin, "The Death of the Prophet," in Commentary, 9 (March 1950), 257-61. 9 • ? Notes of a Native Son, p. 92. 120

1® The same sentence ("He refused to eat because he said that his family was trying to poison him") appears in Notes of a Native Son, p. 89. n Eckman, Furious Passage, p. 73* Notes of a Native Son, pp. 101-102. Notes, P* 1°7. Eckman, Furious Passage, p. 73. 121

Chapter 5

Affection between White Fathers and Sons and Ambivalence toward Non-Conformists

The father-son relationship has significance in any society. In general, the father is responsible for teaching the son the traditional values of the community, passing on the wisdom of the race, providing the masculine model, and handing down the acquired property of his family to his offspring, usually the son. The father and the community hold the son responsible for preserving the cultural traditions that have been practiced by the forefathers for generations which follow him. A group of persons which does not possess a significant amount of property will pass on to its progeny whatever It has acquired. For a few Afro-Americans, as has been seen in the discussion of the four stories in Chapter 4, that heritage may be largely a religious tradition which is, at best, borrowed or imposed. From the point of view of the black sons, the religious i heritage that their father expects them to accept and preserve is not a positive contribution, because its ultimate effect arrests the normal and natural 122 development of masculine traits. Consequently, the Grimes sons reject the model offered by their father and the strict religious codes that he attempts to impose upon them. The relations between the black father and his sons dramatized in the Bildungsroman, and the interactions between white fathers and their sons depicted in "The Man Child" and "Going to Meet the Man’’3" provide a study of sharp contrasts. In the stories about the Grimes family most of the tension emerges from within the family, and the minister- father generates conflicts between himself and his sons; but in the stories about white families there exists genuine love between fathers and sons, and the tension is created by characters who are not members of the immediate family. Unlike the Grimes sons, who develop intense feelings of hatred for their stern father, the white sons grow stronger in their identification with and love for their fathers. While the aggressive masculine traits of the Grimes sons are suppressed, those same character traits are encouraged by white fathers. Unlike the Grimes sons, who live in constant terror of their aggressive father, who uses physical punishment as a disciplinary measure, 123 the white sons are not threatened by their father, admire his strong masculine traits, and imitate him. And, finally, while the black sons regard their father as a menacing figure, who denies them freedom to pursue their own interests, the white sons enjoy warm, friendly relations with their fathers; the white sons do not fear their fathers, but fear other menacing characters who either murder them, eventually, or change the traditional values of their families and communities. (Although in the five stories sharp contrasts between the Grimes family and the white families are apparent, Baldwin is not deliberately distorting reality by suggesting that all black American families experience strife, while all white families enjoy harmony; his image of black and white families is not intended as a metaphor of typical family relations. Like Eric and Jesse and their fathers, black sons and fathers also develop strong bonds of affection in ’’Sonny’s Blues’’ and ’’This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,*’ stories discussed in Chapter 6.) The contrasts between Eric, the blond, eight- year-old through whose perceptions "The Man Child" is related, and Johnnie, the central character and 124 central consciousness of the four stories dealing with the urban black experience, stand out in bold relief. And the chief differences rest upon three bases: (1) the white father owns property which he plans to leave to his son and which will carry on the honored American chain of inheritance; whereas, as has been noted, the black father, having little personal property, wishes to leave his religious heritage to his sons; (2) the religious code which the black father requires his sons to practice keeps them ignorant of life in the secular world; while, on the other hand, the lack of emphasis on religious principles and moral codes by the white fathers allows their sons freedom to experience life in the natural and secular world and to acquire knowledge of ways to survive it; and^X^J when the black minister attempts to express normal parental affection toward his son, Roy, whom he loves dearly, the problem of religion, which stands between them, causes the son to reject his father's most sincere love; whereas, the love between Eric and his father flows freely with pride and sincerity on the part of both father and son. 125

The flashback scene dealing with Jamie’s birthday party reveals Eric's movement from identifi­ cation with his mother to identification with his father. Before Eric’s father takes him out to survey the property of the family, Eric remains close to his mother's side or spends time sleeping in her lap. Like his mother, who does not desire to hear the stories about her husband and Jamie's past experiences together, Eric tries to block out their conversation by concentrating on an insect which buzzes around his head. Both Eric and his mother fear Jamie, the silent and mysterious farmhand, who breaks into a tantrum under the strain of the taunts of Eric's father. Mother and child react sympathetically toward Jamie’s present isolation. Because of their.fear of Jamie, Eric's mother feels a strong need to protect her child by keeping him within eyesight, and Eric wishes to be pampered and protected against possible physical harm. Not unlike Elizabeth Grimes in the Bildungsroman, Eric's mother also recognizes a need to have her child accompanied by an adult when the child ventures outside the home: "She did not really like him to go wandering off by himself. She would have forbidden it 126 completely and kept Eric under her eye all day hut in this she was overruled: Eric’s father liked to think of Eric as being curious about the world and as being daring enough to explore it, with his own eyes, by himself" (48-49). When Eric decides to go out into the fields on the day he is murdered, he, like Roy Grimes, defies the authority of his mother. On the day of Jamie’s birthday party Eric begins to identify with the image provided by his father; that summer day marks the initiation of Eric into manhood. Eric’s father supplies through conversation and behavior a definition of manhood and uses his own accomplishments as a model for his son. Eric's father first teaches his son the qualities that do not fit into the male adult concept. The father uses his lifetime "friend" and drinking partner, Jamie, as the antithesis of and machismo. According to the father's definition, the ideal man should have a wife, should care for her, should own property, and should have children, who will eventually inherit the bounties of his labor. Eric's father thus uses Jamie as a foil, as a living example of human failure; for Jamie has lost his wife, is childless, has had to sell his farm, and has, consequently, become a lonely, l unfulfilled wanderer who dreams of the past. 127

In the stylized scene in which Eric and his father go out to survey their farm, Eric’s father teaches him the value of his inheritance and encourages the son to accept the traditional values of the responsible family man. “My father," he said after a moment, "had some of this land—and when he died it was mine. He held on to it for me. And I did my best with the land. I had, and I got some more. I’m holding on to it for you. . . • When I get to be a real old man," said his father, "even older than old Jamie there—you’re going to have to take care of all this. When I die it’s going to be yours." He paused and stopped; Eric looked up at him. "When you get to be a man, like your Papa, you’re going to get married and have children. And all this is - going to be theirs." "And when they get married?" Eric prompted. “All this will belong to their children," his father said. "Forever?" cried Eric. “Forever," said his father.(59-60) Eric’s father’s dream of living forever through the perpetuation of the human species, of passing on the traditions and properties of his foreparents, and of seeing his son as a proud, strong, aggressive heir, promises to be fulfilled when Eric, on that day in summer, begins to understand his place in life and comes to accept the values taught by his father. By autumn, Eric’s identification with the adult male image provided by his proud father—"the giant-killer, 128 the hunter, the lover—the real old Adam” who intends to "cover the earth" with children, and on whom "the world depends" to sustain human life—is strongly reflected in his imitation of his father’s masculine model• Eric pretended that he was his father and was walking through the fields as he had seen his father walk, looking it all over calmly, pleased, knowing that everything he saw belonged to him. And he stopped and pee’d as he had seen his father do, standing wide­ legged and heavy in the middle of the fields; he pretended at the same time to be smoking and talking, as he had seen his father do. Then, having watered the ground, he walked on, and all the earth, for that moment, in Eric’s eyes, seemed to be celebrating Eric.(64) Although the male model exemplified by Eric’s father has a positive quality—dedication and a sense of responsibility to the family—that image is not an ideal one, for the father’s pride of ownership and possession stems from his denigration of Jamie. Eric’s father can feel whole and secure only when he rides rough-shod over the back of Jamie; that is, he must use Jamie as an example of failure in order to feel superior. Eric’s father is not the innocent Adam who is given charge of the Garden of Eden, but the corrupt earth man who exploits others in order to advance his 129 own purposes. It is on the ashes of Jamie that he constructs the foundations of his masculinity. In ’’The Man Child" the source of tension is not between father and son, but springs from the relation­ ship between Eric’s father and Jamie, who have known each other since childhood. "They had grown up together, gone to war together, and survived together—never, apparently, while life ran, were they to be divided" (49). But, although they continue to work together in the fields, eat together, and drink together, they have been separated by their interests and personalities. J The story suggests that during their childhood and , they shared a close and warm friendship. But since their days in the army Eric's father has taken on broader, adult interests, while Jamie has attempted to remain a child from a psychological viewpoint. In the birthday party scene Jamie threatens to tell Eric’s mother about some of the things he and Eric's father did as youngsters, but Eric's father implies that he will kill Jamie if he reveals those experiences. The story subtly suggests that as youngsters the two men engaged in homosexual activity; but since late adolescence, when 130

Eric’s father began to take an interest in women, and started “skirt-chasing,” the homosexual affair was discontinued. Like David Jackson in "The Outing,” who has become more interested in Sylvia than in Johnnie Grimes, Eric’s father seems to have lost his sexual interest in Jamie. Like Johnnie, who spends most of the day alone, wandering in agony on Bear Mountain because David has neglected him, Jamie has spent years wandering through the forest and walking the country roads, desiring to re-establish his childhood sexual relationship with Eric’s father. Although Johnnie at the end of "The Outing" fears that he may never enjoy his earlier experiences with David, Jamie has completely lost Eric's father as lover. Jamie over the years has become obsessed with wanting to win his childhood sexual partner back. After he was discharged from the Army, he tried to fulfill society’s expectations by getting married, but was unable to receive sexual gratification from that relationship. He neglected his wife by taking long walks in the woods during the day and drinking with his friend during the night. Eventually, tired of being left alone, and frustrated by her lack of sexual 131 fulfillment, his wife becomes a whore, and finally she breaks her marriage vows by leaving Jamie. Jamie falls apart, loses his farm, goes to the city for a short while, but returns hoping one day to regain possession of Eric's father. Having built his world and dreams around gaining his sexual partner back, Jamie has waited for at least eight years, but his dream will never be fulfilled. "A man’s not supposed to sit around and mope," said Eric’s father, wrathfully, "for things that are over and dead and finished, things that can't ever , and that can't ever be the same again. That's what I mean when I say that you’re a dreamer—and if you hadn't kept on dreaming so long, you might not be alone now." (55) Instead of facing his own alienation and loneliness, Jamie attempts to escape it by walking, drinking, and smoking. "He walked as though he were going to walk to the other end of the world and knew it was a long way but knew that he would be there by morning" (49), His brown and yellow dog is his constant companion, but Jamie refuses to show any affection toward it; whenever the dog leaps upon his master, Jamie always cuffs him "down lightly, with one hand." Having been rejected by his beloved, Jamie cuts himself off from the affection of even his dog. 132

The meaninglessness and emptiness of Jamie’s life are escaped, temporarily, through his drinking. ’’Drunk, he became rigid, as though he imagined himself in the army again” (51). Whenever he goes to the Rafters to drink with his friend, he is able to return to the war days when he and Eric's father went to bars in England to drink. During the army experience, no wife or child stood between the lover and the beloved. Jamie also smokes a pipe and tries to escape the futility of his own existence by hiding behind the fog of the smoke. But no fog is heavy enough to cover over the fact that Jamie's pipe-dreams are merely fantasies. Jamie wanders daily through the fantasy world of past dreams and present nightmares. The personality of Jamie is, indeed, ironic. Although he is only thirty-four years old, his agony has made him age far beyond his chronological span. "Jamie looked old." "Jamie’s not so old. He's not as old as he should be," says Eric’s father. But psychologically, Jamie has failed to mature past childhood—he is the man-child. During his birthday party, which turns out to be an occasion for sadistic, insult-humor for Eric’s father, Jamie takes his frustrations out on his dog, his faithful companion, 133

rather than striking back at the man who taunts him unmercifully. Although he is a man, he tries to play the role of housewife during the illness of Eric’s mother, and becomes frustrated when he knows that he is unable to fill that role. In the end, he expresses his agony not by murdering his best friend, but by breaking the neck of Eric, Throughout the story there is an ironic mixture of Jamie's laughter and tears. Jamie is a miserable homosexual who has isolated himself from the heterosexual world, and to Baldwin, this alienation is dangerous and ultimately destructive not only to the individual but to the p foundations of society. In "The Male Prison" Baldwin objects to the over-glorification of homosexuality in Madeline, Andre Gide's journal about the positive aspects of homosexual relationships, Baldwin writes, It does not take long, after all, to discover that sex is only sex, that there are few things on earth more futile or more deadening than a meaningless round of conquests. The really horrible thing about the phenomenon of present- day homosexuality ... is that today's unlucky deviate can only save himself by the most tremendous exertion of all his forces from falling into an underworld in which he never meets either men or women, where it is impossible to have either a lover or a friend, where the possibility of genuine human involvement has altogether ceased. When this possibility has ceased, so has the possibility of growth. 134

Jamie’s childhood-or rather childish—fixation on his homosexual relationship has stunted his psychological growth and has left him, in the eyes of the world, a metaphor of human failure. What Baldwin wishes both Johnnie Grimes and Jamie to realize is that they can not become whole men if they continue to live in a fantasy world which denies them full expression of their homosexual needs. Baldwin continues, It is one of the facts of life that there are two sexes, which in fact has given the world most of its beauty, cost it not a little of its anguish, and contains the hope and the glory of the world. And it is with this fact, which might better perhaps be called a mystery, that every human being born must find some way to live. For, no matter what demons drive them, men cannot live without women and women cannot live without men. . . . When men can no longer love women, they cease to love or respect or trust each other, which makes their isolation complete. Nothing is more dangerous than this isolation, for men will commit any crimes whatever rather than endure it.* When Jamie can no longer bear the agony óf alienation, he becomes a dangerous menace to the heterosexual world; and it is his isolation, which continues because be desperately clings to his homosexual fantasy, which motivates his murder of Eric. "The Man Child” is not intended as a diatribe 135 against homosexual love, but as a statement against self-imposed isolation of homosexual men who refuse to face the reality of changing relations. If eight-year-old Eric in "The Man Child" had lived until he had reached the age of forty-two, he might have become a Jesse, the central character and central consciousness of "Going to Meet the Man.” Just as Eric developed a strong identification with the physical attributes, social views, and psychological needs of his aggressive, sadistic father, so does Jesse when he reaches the age of eight. Both sons are taken into the field and are taken through an initiation rite by their proud fathers; both sons are placed on the strong muscular shoulders of their fathers, who feel a psychological need to emasculate or castrate others, either by symbolic or physical methods. Through the behavior of their fathers, the sons come to believe that there is a connection between sex and violence. While Eric associates the copulation of his parents with "blind and dreadful bulls," Jesse, as a child, begins to associate the sexual intercourse of his parents with the "exotic" and "primitive" blacks, who, through the imagination of Jesse's father, "tear off a piece." Adopting the attitudes of 136 their fathers toward the love-making, both boys come to regard sexual intercourse between human beings—not as a tender, shared experience, full of compassion and warmth, not as an experience which fulfills the sexual urges of both men and women—but as a bloody, sadistic act in which the male plays the dominant role. In both stories, furthermore, each father teaches his son to reject persons who refuse to conform to the norms established by the dominant society: for Eric’s father the rejected symbol becomes Jamie, the lonely homosexual, who attempts to break his isolation by performing a desperate act of murder; for Jesse’s father, the rejected symbol is a black man, who defies the legal principles and social taboos of the American South by "knocking down old Miss Standish." The homosexual and the black man—the menaces to society— both threaten to destroy the already cracking foundations upon which the orderly conduct of the conservative communities has been established; both the sexual deviate and the defiant black man who acts, from the community’s point of view, out of character, strike out against a society that either forbids them sincere sexual expression, or denies them the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, 137

The sons learn that such persons are to he feared, destroyed, or both. Although the fathers in “The Man Child" and "Going to Meet the Man" stand as one in their contempt for the qualities of the homosexual and the black man that violate the written and unwritten laws of the communities in which they have been placed, the fathers love the part of the social outcasts that provides them with a platform upon which to stand and declare their sexual or racial superiority. In short, the fathers are ambivalent toward the nonconformists, who, through contrast, provide the father figures their Identity, their role in life and their place in society. Once the fathers have established their identity, they pass down to their sons the knowledge of who they should become. While Eric's initiation into manhood happens on the birthday of the taunted outcast Jamie, Jesse's initiation rite occurs on the death-day of a young, defiant black man, who strikes at the tender heart of the forces responsible for his educational and economic deprivation. Both Jamie and the black man—who is lynched, castrated, and burned—strike out against the most sensitive and fragile elements in the society which has made them sufferers: an eight-year- 138 old youngster and an old Southern belle are the victims of the fellow-sufferers. It is an indirect strike, but an effective act, for the oppressed have, through their violence, heightened the emotional intensity of both stories. Even though Eric and Miss Standish are relatively innocent of the injustices visited upon the outcasts, the child and the woman are expected to benefit, ultimately, from the behavior of the male oppressors. If Eric had been allowed to live, he would have inherited his father’s property, part of which, at one time, belonged to Jamie, and the other part, one can assume, belonged to American Indians, before they were herded off to reservations. The Southern belle, likewise, is able to maintain her "superior” position on the social ladder at the expense of black people who were forced to plow and pick cotton and tobacco during slavery, and who, after the Civil War, became the over-worked and under-paid bondsmen and women to either agricultural or industrial systems, both North and South. During the initiation rites, the fathers fail to make their sons aware of those painful realities; what the sons get instead is a false sense of superiority. 139

The day of the marks Jesse’s movement from innocence to corruption. Up until the day of that memorable "picnic,” he regarded blacks as human beings capable of rational thought and responsible behavior. In fact, he feels that his childhood playmate and best friend, Otis, a black boy who is also eight years old, is his intellectual superior. On his way to the lynching, Jesse wants to ask his parents what the purpose of the picnic is, but fears asking them, for they have transformed themselves into mysterious strangers. Jesse wants to turn to his familiar friend, Otis, for an explanation of the behavior of the whites in the community. He did not quite understand what was happening and he did not know what to ask—he had no one to ask. He had grown accustomed, for the solution of■ such mysteries, to go to Otis. He felt that Otis knew everything. But he could not ask Otis about this. Anyway, he had not seen Otis for two days; he had not seen a black face anywhere for more than two days.(212) Because he does not have the blacks to measure himself against, to show him who he is and what his role is according to the society that gave him birth, Jesse, temporarily, loses his sense of identity. The white child becomes a metaphor for Southern whites who must, consciously and unconsciously, define themselves in 140

relation to the black world, for without the presence of black people, the white South’s self-image would have to be altered. Douglass Turner Ward’s Day of Absence (1965), an expressionistic, comic satirical fantasy about the sudden disappearance of blacks In the South, strongly suggests, like "Going to Meet the Man,” that the white American would he lost and helpless without the presence and support of the black American. Jesse loses his conscious need for Otis ("Now the thought of Otis made him sick") and gains anew sense of identity when he becomes aware of his whiteness—when he is taught by his parents that he, not Otis, is expected to take on the leadership responsibility of the community. Through his father and mother, Jesse learns that whites must teach blacks to stay in their place as obedient, second-class citizens. Before the hoy identifies himself with his parents and the racist mob of which they have become a part, he wants to question the justice of the violence: "What did he do? Jesse wondered, What did the man do? What did he do?—but he could not ask his" parents, who have become "strangers to him now." 141

This is the last time in his life that Jesse asks himself questions about man’s inhumanity to man. On the shoulders of his father, Jesse identifies himself with his mother—"He watched his mother's face. Her eyes were very bright, her mouth was open: she was more beautiful than he had ever seen her and more strange"—and feels a love-hatred for the hanging black man—Jesse becomes aware of "a joy he had never felt before. He watched the hanging, gleaming body, the most beautiful and terrible object he had seen till then. One of his father’s friends reached up and in his hands he held the knife; and Jesse wished that he had been that man." Jesse desires to stretch, cradle, and caress the black man’s penis, "much bigger than his father’s, flaccid, hairless, the largest thing he had ever seen till then, and the blackest" (216). The black man—cast in the image of the suffering Christ, hanging on the cross—condemns Jesse’s soul when he looks "straight into Jesse’s eyes—it could not have been as long as a second, but it seemed longer than a year. Then Jesse screamed." He releases his tensions through his scream, and has become fully initiated into the society. 142

"Well, I told you," said his father* "you wasn’t never going to forget this picnic." His father’s face was full of sweat, his eyes were very peaceful. At that moment Jesse loved his father more than he had ever loved him. He felt that his father had carried him through a mighty test, had revealed to him the great secret which would be the key to his life forever.(217) From the day of the picnic, from the moment that his father takes him from his shoulders and places him on the ground, Jesse ceases growing in his understanding of black people. Even as a forty-two-year-old, he is, like Jamie, a man-child, one who clings to the past. Jesse stopped asking significant questions about human justice and human dignity at the age of eight; and for some thirty-four years he has accepted the approved values and attitudes of the bigoted white majority in his community. And according to the standards of his community, Jesse has become a respectable, responsible, and God­ fearing citizen. Before he became a deputy sheriff, Jesse worked as a collector of payments for a mail-order house. Although deep within him he knows that he is the company’s agent who is required to exploit blacks—"they were too dumb to know that they were being cheated blind, but that was no skin off his ass— he was just supposed to do his job"—he shifts the 143

ultimate responsibility on the company and tries to salve his guilty conscience by giving black children candy. When a ten-year-old black, the grandson of Mrs. Julia Blossom, rejects Jesse’s candy and demands that Jesse call the grandmother by her full name, Jesse feels threatened. Like his father before him, Jesse feels a need to castrate the defiant grandson (who has now become the leader of protest demonstra­ tions for equal rights) in order to feel sexually secure. The grandson violates Jesse’s image of the good black man—that lowly creature who abides by the laws and shows respect to whites by grinning, going to church, stepping off the sidewalk when meeting a white person, and leaving the interracial breeding to the white man. Those blacks who fulfill those requirements will, after death, be rewarded a crown in their black heaven, their Green Pastures. Of course, to Jesse, heaven is segregated, and God, to be sure, is a white man, who sympathizes with the white Southerner’s burden. That servants should obey their masters is a principle that some white Southern ministers—during and after slavery—often taught their congregations. 144

And Jesse, the God-fearing, law-abiding citizen, has taken their teachings seriously. He tried to be a good person and treat everybody right: it wasn't his fault if the had taken it into their heads to fight against God and go' against the rules laid down in the Bible for everyone to read! He was only doing his duty; protecting the white people from the niggers and the niggers from themselves.(204- 205) The black demonstrators have made Jesse's task of protecting the community difficult. He fears the militant, sexually potent blacks, and his fear and anxiety of confronting them render him sexually impotent in the opening scene of the story. Wishing to escape by recalling the power exercised by whites in the past, or wishing to crawl into the womb of his wife, Grace, are Jesse’s fantasies that help him blot out present reality. Before the demonstrations Jesse, as deputy sheriff, felt free to arrest a black woman and rape her. He feels that black women are free of the sexual inhibitions of white Southern belles, who have yet, in Jesse’s mind, to liberate themselves from Victorian attitudes toward sex. When he cannot achieve an erection, he does not feel free to ask Grace, the ideal lady, to masturbate or perform oral sex on him; but he 145

can force black women to perform those functions. Baldwin feels that the white Southern gentleman has had and still has a need for the black woman as a sexual partner. The Southerner remembers, historically and in his own psyche, a kind of Eden in which he loved black people and they loved him. Historically, the flaming sword laid across this Eden is the Civil War. Personally, it Is the Southerner’s sexual coming of age, when, without warning, unbreakable taboos are set up between himself and his past. Every­ thing, thereafter, is permitted him except the love that he remembers and has never ceased to need. The resulting, indescribable torment affects every Southern mindt-and is the basis of the Southern hysteria,' Baldwin, no doubt, had a person like Jesse in mind when • he wrote the above statement, for Jesse definitely feels the need to continue his sexual affairs with black women—he feels that they have "a little more spice” than Grace can give him. ’’Going to Meet the Man” supports the notion (some critics call it a myth) of the white man’s underlying fear of the black man's sexual potence and sexual superiority. Jesse can achieve an erection and can perform a sadistic sexual act—he can ’’tear off a piece”—only through identification with the genitals of the black male, the penis either mutilated or cut off. Jesse's sexual freedom comes only when he 146

imagines himself a black male stud and his wife a white woman making love to that potent black man: "Come on sugar, I'm going to do you just like a nigger, just like a nigger, come on sugar and love me just like you’d love a nigger." After he has, through his fantasy, transformed himself into the black male figure, Jesse regains potency and engages in sexual intercourse until morning, until the first cock crows. The crowing of the cock not only indicates the coming of dawn, hut, ironically, portends the eventual death of Jesse at the hands of the proud black demonstrators. The black demonstrators have changed the words to one of the , perhaps the one that says "before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go to my Lord and be free." The new words to the song read, "Before I’ll be a slave, I see a white man in bis grave. Where have all the lovers gone?" The cock warns Jesse that he, like the members of Pharoah’s army, will perish in the flood of racial violence. This notion is reinforced by the Black folk spiritual, "River of Jordan": I stepped in the river at Jordan. The water came to my knees. I stepped in the river "at"” Jordan. The water came to my waist. I stepped in the river at Jordan. 147

The water came over my head. I looked way over to the oljher side. He was making up my dying bed! The Red Sea has become the Jordan River in "Going to Meet the Man"; blacks have become the suffering Israelites; and Jesse has become the unprepared sinner, with water up to his waist, who is doomed to drown. Jesse feels that he is "drowning in niggers," and must cry for mercy: "Oh, Lord! Come on and ease my troubling mind" (208). In “The Man Child" and "Going to Meet the Man" the theme of mutual affection between fathers and sons is developed and may be viewed in a more positive sense than is apparent in relations in the Grimes family. Although the male members of the families develop and maintain harmonious relations, which is a desirable goal, Baldwin does not idealize father-son communion. Both white fathers teach their sons self- respect, but they foster in their children attitudes which deny respect for people who are socially, sexually, culturally, or racially different from the white majority. In order to preserve the status quo, each father initiates his son into a world of traditional masculine values which have a basis in Yang or Logos principles (i.e. the normal male is 148

expected to be aggressive, competitive, controlling, ambitious, and often violent).The initiation rite also involves either a verbal or physical kind of sexual saidsm, which the fathers direct against either the menacing homosexual or the threatening black. Not exactly ideal, the traditional system of accepted, masculine values transmitted to the sons, which they almost without question adopt, denies the freedom of others to be sexually different, and the right to personal and social liberties. The arrogance of the Logos-oriented fathers is, indeed, ironic. The irony derives from the need of the sexually insecure fathers to use the sexual deviate or the black man as a tool to cultivate masculinity, while at the same time they have the impulse to humiliate and destroy the outcasts. The value system to which the fathers subscribe and seek to maintain renders them ambivalent toward persons who are considered friends (sexual! partners in the past), yet enemies (threats to family and society at present). The stories dramatize the consequences of perpetuating a value system which keeps the outcasts at bay: Eric is murdered by Jamie as a desperate but symbolic gesture—a direct way of injuring his best 149 friend, his beloved (who represents the heterosexual world), and an indirect way to break isolation; Jesse becomes a bigoted "law-and-order" adult, who is sexually dependent on blacks, some of whom are awaiting their chance to drown him in the sea of racial injustice. 150

Notes

"The Man Child" and "Going to Meet the Man" were originally published in Baldwin’s collection, Going to Meet the Man (New York: Dell, 1965), pp. 48-67,T98^218. Subsequent references to these stories will appear parenthetically in the text of this chapter. 2 Baldwin’s review of Madeline, "Gide as Husband and Homosexual," was first publishes in (December 13, 1954), pp. 18-20; the review was reprinted as "The Male Prison" in Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell, 1961), pp. 127-32. Baldwin, "The Male Prison," pp. 131-32. Leslie Fiedler pairs the American black man and the homosexual as menacing outsiders in "Come Back to the Ag’in, Huck Honey!" an article which was originally printed in Partisan Review (June 1948); rpt. in The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, Vol. I (New York: rSBein“and" Day i’“T97l7, pp. 142^51*: After I had completed the first draft of this chapter, which, in part, draws parallels between the oppression of blacks and homosexuals, I became aware of the similarities between my ideas and Fiedler’s, 7 James Baldwin, ", Uptown: A Letter from Harlem," in Nobody Knows My Name, p. 65. 6 For definition and extensive discussion of the Yin and Yang principles as reflected in literature, see Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, published by Harper and How in 1973. 151

Chapter 6

Escape, Estrangement, Identity Problems, and Need for Racial Affirmation

In "Previous Condition," "Come Out the Wilder­ ness," "Sonny's Blues," and "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon," the dominant theme is escape from the home community and the resultant problems of adjustment and identity. In each story the central •character has left the community of his or her birth and is living in another neighborhood in New York City, or in Paris. Of the three black male protagonists who have chosen the performing arts as their career, only one has become popular and successful. The other / central character, a black female secretary who has lived with a rather successful black musician for four years, now lives with and provides financial support for an unsuccessful white artist. Each of these stories explores the social and psychological problems that grow out of estrangement from the culture of the black community. In Baldwin’s view, the decision of whether to remain in or escape from the black community produces a dilemma for blacks: 152

One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene. Amputation is swift but time may prove that amputation was not necessary—or one may delay the amputation too long. Gangrene is slow, but it is impossible to be sure that one is reading one’s symptoms right. The idea of going through life as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbear­ able is the risk of swelling up slowly, in agony, with poison. And the trouble, finally, is that the risks are real even if the choices do not exist.1 Since the main characters have already (at the beginning of each story) chosen to cut themselves off from their cultural roots, what are the consequences? Baldwin suggests answers to this perplexing question in each story. ’’Previous Condition" provides one of the answers in its portrayal of Peter, a black man who fled his A native New Jersey community when he was sixteen and o who is still running. In the first paragraph of the story he describes his awakening from a nightmare: ’’I woke up shaking, alone in my room. I was clammy cold with sweat; under me the sheet and the mattress were I soaked. The sheet was gray and twisted like a rope. i I breathed like I had been running" (68). Not only is Peter literally escaping a past which he feels is threatening to strangle him, but he is also a man who is running from himself; the image of a runner serves 153

metaphorically to suggest Peter’s flight from his past identity. The flashbacks following the opening scene relate incidents in which Peter was rejected first as a black child and later as a young man. At age seven Peter first discovers that black children are physically different from white children. When he attempts to play catch with a little white girl, she rejects him: “My mother doesn’t let me play with niggers” (71). Immediately following the name­ calling incident, he runs home and asks his mother for a definition of "nigger.Rather than offering her son a positive definition of his blackness, Peter’s mother tries to skirt the issue by calling attention to his dirty face: "Go wash your face. ... You dirty as sin. Your supper’s on the table" (70). Her avoidance of the problem and insistence on clean skin make Peter guilty about his skin-color before he is capable of understanding white bigotry. When his mother drags him to the bathroom and scrubs his face, Peter develops a negative self-concept which follows him into adulthood. Excessive scrubbing, in Baldwin’s view, may create in black children feelings of racial inferiority: 154

One was always being mercilessly scrubbed and polished, as though in the hope that a stain could be washed away—I hazard that Negro children of my generation, anyway, had an earlier and more painful acquaintance with soap than any other children anywhere . . . and yet it is clear that none of this effort would release one from the stigma and danger of being a Negro; this effort merely increased the shame and rage.^ When he becomes old enough to join a gang, Peter’s shame and rage surface in gang fights between black and white boys.On one occasion, when he returns home bleeding from an encounter with white boys (as Roy does in "Roy’s Wound"), Peter’s mother punishes him for fighting and warns him that he will eventually turn out like his father (who was a bum, supported by welfare) if he does not accept his fate as a passive, working-class black man. This fate involves not only a perpetuation of the poverty-cycle of .the black community, but also the stereotyped Uncle Tom image and attitude associated with some members of the black neighborhood: "We lived in an old shack in a town in New Jersey in the nigger part of town, the kind of houses colored people live in all over the U.S. I hated my mother for living there. I hated all the people in my neighborhood. They went to church and they got drunk. They were nice to white people. When 155

the landlord came around they paid him and took his crap” (70). To the landlady’s demand that he must return to the black community, Peter replies, "I can’t stand niggers." The absence of his father concurrently affords him no positive male model. Finding nothing positive to identify with in his home community, Peter seeks to escape his shame and rage by searching for a new identity in the white world. Peter’s secrecy and hiding in the beginning of the story immediately draws attention to the fact that he has not been accepted as an equal by the white community. As he listens to Beethoven—music being the only thing in the story to which he can relate fully—Peter must assure himself that he, too, is a man. "Peter," I said, "don't let them scare you to death. You're a man, too" (70). But his treatment by his landlady contradicts this impression of himself. She rejects him because "women are afraid to come home nights" (76), implying that he, more than other men, might sexually assault the female tenants. His rage at having been assigned the attributes of an animal, simply because of his color, reaches a climax as he wishes to kill her. His Bigger Thomas anger subsides into Uncle Tom servility, however, when the

k 156 landlady threatens to call the police; for he knows too well that they will "put him in his place." The eviction deepens Peter’s self-hatred: "I was aware of my body under the bathrobe; and it was as though I had done something wrong, something monstrous, years ago, which no one had forgotten and for which I would be killed" (76-77). In an effort to escape his past, Peter steps out of his own personality to become an actor, one who adopts the image of other people. One of the roles Peter has acted out on the stage is that of an "intellectual Uncle Tom, a young college student working for his race" (69). But off the stage Peter avoids conflicts with white policemen by wearing the mask of non-intellectual, humble Uncle Tom, and by doing so he avoids beatings and manages to stay out of prisons. To white policemen, Peter presents himself as one whom Kenneth Stampp in The Peculiar Institution identifies as a "good slave," the non­ belligerent "happy" black who does not defy white authority.®

When he is offered the part of Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's dramatic version of Native Son,7 Peter rejects this role because it represents the polar 157

extreme of the Uncle Tom stereotype. Although he plays the Uncle Tom role as a survival stratagem, he rejects the Bigger Thomas role in his life because he knows that injury, imprisonment, or death is the ultimate Q fate of aggressive and defiant blacks. After his eviction, his friends urge him to fight, but he replies, "I’ve been fighting so goddam long I’m not a person any more" (78). His own conception of what an actor should be further serves to lower Peter’s estimation of himself and creates more feelings of guilt: "Acting’s a rough IJ.fe-f^even-if you’re white. I’m not tall and I’m not good looking and I can't sing or dance and I’m not white" (69), (According to his biographer, James Baldwin saw his career as a writer and himself as a man in the late 1940’s exactly the same way that Peter sees himself as an actor and man: "He wrote the story in the first person, casting himself as Peter, a young actor. To Peter, he attributed his own grievances, his own experience with police, his own contempt for the Negro, his own furious ambivalence toward the q. whites who wanted to help him but didn’t know how."y) 'Hating himself, other blacks, and most whites, Peter's artistic talent cannot reach its full potential, just 158 as Baldwin’s talent was not nourished by his self- hatred; it was only after Baldvzin eliminated his , self-hatred that he matured as an artist. With no love for himself, Peter cannot develop trusting relationships with other people. His associates ("friends”) Jules, who is Jewish, and Ida, who is a descendant of poor Irish stock, are also outcasts in the white world. Although through their own suffering they can sympathize with him, Jules and Ida, because they are not black Americans, cannot empathize with Peter's inner-suffering. Aware of Peter's emotional insecurity, caused by being rejected continually by the white world, Jules sympathizes with Peter and provides a place for Peter to stay temporarily. Because of her husband's homosexual tendencies, and because she married out of the need for financial security, rather than love, Ida buys Peter food and seeks to satisfy her sexual passions through him. When he is not playing the role of Ida's super-masculine lover, he is expected to act as her child, especially when in public places. At the restaurant Ida, the liberal, lectures Peter on human suffering as a universal problem: "We're all in this together, the whole world. Don't let it throw you. 159

... In all of Europe there’s famine and disease, in France and England they hate the Jews—nothing's going to change, baby, people are too empty-headed and empty-hearted” (81). Not desiring to he lectured to, Peter feels the urge to "stop her voice" (the Bigger Thomas impulse rises again) but instead of strangling Ida, he ends her lecture by saying, "I’m gonna go back to my people where I belong and find a nice, black nigger wench and raise a flock of babies" (81). For having threatened to leave her, Ida raps Peter's knuckles with a fork, as a mother might do to her naughty boy. This rap brings out all of the rage in Peter; he screams, stands up and knocks over a candle 11 on the table. Surfacing is Peter's contempt for Ida and the white world. As the story ends, Peter attempts to reunite himself with the black world, which he has carried contempt for since his childhood. After he leaves the restaurant, he rides the subway and sees contempt in the faces of a white girl and her lover. In Peter’s paranoid way of looking at the world, he feels that every white person expects him to act out the role of a super-masculine-menial, or a passionate rapist. 160

Seeking solace in a Harlem bar, he soon finds that he is as much an alien there as in the hostile white world: I kept on drinking, listening to the voices of my people, watching the faces of my people. ... I longed for an opening, some sign, something to make me a part of the life around me. But there was nothing except my color. A white outsider coming in would have seen a young Negro drinking in a Negro bar, perfectly in his element, in his place, as the saying goes. But the people knew differently as I did. I didn’t seem to have a place (84). Peter trembles at the end of the story and fears being rejected by blacks as much as he trembled at the beginning, fearing the rejection of whites. He is an artist-intellectual, suspended between the white world, which he longs to trust and love, and the black world, which he comes to realize he needs in order to discover his identity. Through his portrayal of Peter, the author suggests that some of the consequences of severing connections with one’s cultural heritage are self-hatred, double-estrangement, loneliness, paranoia, frustration, and lack of purpose in life. Homeless and alienated Peter is not alone in his troubles; the twenty-six-year-old secretary, Ruth 12 Bowman in "Gome Out the Wilderness,” shares with him the agony of estrangement, which has increased in 161 intensity for both characters during a ten-year period of separation from their home communities. Equal in their contempt for black Harlem, Peter and Ruth have chosen Greenwich Village as a place of residence, as a place to gain a new. self-perspective. Although her job as secretary in a life insurance company provides financial security (which Peter, the actor, lacks), Ruth's position as an outsider in the predominantly white world produces in her the problem of emotional insecurity. As is common in the short fiction of Baldwin, Ruth's estrangement from her family and eventually from black people and her problem of insecurity grow out of her failure to transcend race and culture. From her adolescence to her early adulthood, Ruth’s life has revolved around experiences with black and white males. Within a twenty-four-hour period, the central character reminisces, and attempts to find the causes of her present anxiety and frustration. A flashback recalls one of her early experiences with her boyfriend in a Southern rural community. In the Incident the couple is surprised by Ruth’s brother in a barn. Her brother, who has entertained incestuous thoughts, instantly accuses the couple of engaging in 162 sexual intercourse, although Ruth pleads innocence. Like Peter’s mother in "Previous Condition," Ruth’s brother associates the dirt on Ruth’s body with her skin color: "you dirty ... you dirty ... you black and dirty" (181). Although she refuses to confess guilt when her father takes her to church, she knows that in the eyes of her family she is considered a sinner; and, ironically, she eventually accepts the negative image created by her family; "she felt dirty; she felt that nothing would ever make her clean" (181). Humiliated and guilt-ridden, Ruth is easily persuaded at seventeen to ran away from home with Arthur, a musician, who is more than twenty years older than she, to begin a new life up North. Even though she feels guilty before she enters the world of experience, Ruth’s geographical move metaphorically represents her actual journey to experience; the metaphor of the country, representing innocence, stands antithetical to the image of the city, symbolizing corruption; the rural and urban settings form one of the significant leitmotifs in "Come Out the Wilderness." Although from a moral point of view Ruth begins her downfall by living out of wedlock with Arthur, from 163

a personal, social, and economic standpoint, her experience with her lover proves beneficial; for from that relationship she gains a new sense of self-worth. By teaching her to speak English clearly, helping her to dress appropriately for social events, introducing her to the art world, and sending her to business school to become proficient in the skills of typing and shorthand, Arthur contributes positively to Ruth's personal and intellectual development. Arthur accepts her as a woman with potential, and tries to help her discover her own abilities. Having an appreciation for Arthur’s role in her personal and professional development, but lacking a strong feeling of sexual attraction for him (to Ruth, he is more a father-figure than a mutual lover), Ruth starts searching for a way to escape Arthur's controlling influence. When she realizes that she lacks ability to perform as a singer, she concludes that she does not fit into Arthur’s entertainment world, and grows indifferent toward him. Ruth, the beloved, breaks with Arthur, the lover, when she gains a positive identity: "Through him, she got over feeling that she was black and unattractive, and as soon as this happened, she was able to leave him" (182). 164

After she finally breaks her four-year affair with Arthur, she gradually becomes financially independent, but emotionally dependent. Rejecting her lover-father-figure, Arthur, and the life-style of the Harlem ghetto, Ruth drifts downtown to Greenwich Village, the predominantly white bohemian world, gets an apartment on Bank Street, and finds work as a waitress. In one of the Village bars she meets a young white bohemian artist, falls in love with him, and eventually invites him to share her apartment. After a few months of loving and sharing her life with the artist, Ruth comes to the realization that she is being exploited sexually and economically; having exploited Arthur earlier, she has now become the exploited one. Her search for the emotional security of a mutual love relationship ends in disappointment. Because both partners do not give equally to the relationship (Ruth now is the lover, and the artist the beloved), love fails to mature. Because her sexual partner becomes rather indifferent toward her, Ruth’s old feelings of guilt and paranoia return; she feels that her skin color, alone, degrades her in the eyes of her white partner. Reflected against a background of whiteness, she gradually begins to feel inferior, and her inner frustration surfaces: Look, this is the twentieth century. We’re not down on a plantation. You’re not the master’s son, and I’m not the black girl you can just sleep with when you want and kick about as you please.(195-96) Rejecting the image of herself as a white man’s concubine in the antebellum South, Ruth is, in turn, rejected by the artist: ’’’Well,’ he said at last, •I guess I’ll get hack to the big house and leave you down here with the ’” (196). Based on exploitation rather than mutual respect and love, the affair between "slave woman" and "slave master" ends in bitterness. Ruth’s bitterness toward her first white lover does not turn her against white men as individuals; for her second affair is with Paul, a white artist. As with the first artist, Ruth allows Paul to live with her and supports him while he paints. Paul’s passionate love-making is sexually gratifying to Ruth, but sexual intercourse alone is not enough to sustain the union. Paul's indifference toward her causes Ruth, in recent nights, to tremble in agony on her "bed of ashes and hot coals" (171). His moments of 166 passion and his hours of apathy create ambivalent feelings in Ruth: "She felt like a river trying to run two ways at once: She felt herself shrinking from him, yet she flowed toward him too; she knew he felt it" (175)* Because she subconsciously desires to be punished—"she was punishing herself for something, a crime she could not remember"—(for her blackness and dirtiness)—she cannot bring herself to leave Paul when the opportunity is available. The anguish that grows out of her beloved’s neglect and lies (he often fails to keep his promises of telephoning her at work, and often refuses to come home for dinner), satisfies Ruth’s masochistic desire to be punished. She realizes that Paul is "her trap," but she is unwilling to free herself from his domination over her emotional center. Paul’s death, which she often imagines, or her own death, which she subconsciously desires, would represent a symbolic freedom from her emotional bondage. Not only a slave in an emotional or economic sense, Ruth has become a slave to her own guilt; Paul “had power over her not because she was free but because she was guilty" (187). 16?

Unlike Arthur, her first lover, Paul views Ruth as an intellectual inferior ("I hate bright women11), exploits her sexually, and wants to continue exploiting her economically by painting a portrait of Ruth and selling it commercially: "I’ll probably be able to sell you for a thousand bucks" (175)« The image of the slave woman being sold at an auction disturbs Ruth, makes real the fact that she is being treated as a piece of property, and intensifies her deep-seated hatred for Paul. To end her growing self-hatred, she seeks an alternative: She wished ... that she had never left home. She wished that she had never met Paul. She wished she had never been touched by his whiteness. She should have found a great, slow, black man, full of laughter and sighs and grace, a man at whose center there burned a steady, smokeless fire. She should have surrendered to him and been a woman, and had his children, and found, through being Irreplaceable, despite whatever shadows might cast, peace that could her to endure. (180-81) Perhaps Ruth can regain self-respect through a life with Mr. Davis, an attractive, well-dressed, intelligent, insurance executive with whom she works. When the well-mannered Southern gentleman, who considers himself "a country boy," offers Ruth, "the most sensible girl available," a position as his 168

personal secretary, and promises to help her with her drinking problem by referring her to Alcoholics Anonymous, Ruth accepts the new position. Davis treats Ruth with the respect that she has desired from men. While Ruth has been tumbling on her bed of "hot coals and ashes," Davis has been squirming because he has "Rocks in My Bed"; both are searching for love and inner peace. Davis * friendliness and manner of speech evoke in Ruth memories of her Southern past, when she was an innocent country girl. Amid the chaos of big-city life, Davis "had somehow made her feel safe." He makes her long nostalgically for her life in the country, but the of the city has become "the landscape of her mind"; she has grown confused, impersonal, and insecure; has "grown used to unfriendly people" (191). In her ten years of alienation from home, Ruth has learned to wear the mask of indifference, and has attempted to drown her personal problems in alcohol, and fog over her anguish with cigarette smoke. The possibility exists, however, that she may learn to trust others and respect herself by opening herself to Davis, a vestige of her Southern past, Ruth Bowman, the alien, the woman who has been bent several ways by men, black and white, does not resolve her problem of identity by the end of the story, but becomes more aware of the sources of her pity and rage, and comes to realize that alternatives exist for solving her problems. The path out of her wilderness of guilt, loneliness, confusion, alcoholism, and fantasy leads back to her cultural heritage. The stony ground of the wilderness will not allow the precious flower she has to offer the world to bloom. The two brothers in "Sonny’s Blues,like Peter and Ruth, attempt to escape the realities of their past life in the community of their birth. The older brother, who serves as the story’s narrator, separates himself from Harlem geographically, and becomes immune to the suffering of black people. Sonny, too, leaves the Harlem world, but through experience learns that he must borrow from his racial and cultural heritage in order to achieve honest artistic expression as a musician. The several flashbacks relate various stages of self-awareness of both brothers, and culminate in the narrator’s better understanding of his brother, himself, and the struggle of black people 170 to survive in a world that is sometimes indifferent, and sometimes hostile. A college graduate, a teacher of algebra in a black high school, the narrator has attempted to deaden himself to his cultural past. Having adopted the conventional American middle-class values, he no longer feels personal responsibility for helping alleviate the poverty and ignorance of ghetto-dwellers. Although he lives among poor blacks in a housing project outside the Harlem community, he feels that his educational training makes him superior to them in every way; deep within him he feels contempt for under-educated blacks because they are living examples of his past life, which he has for years tried to blot out of his consciousness. In suppressing images of his past life deep in his subconscious, the narrator has attempted to deny his connection with his brother, Sonny. When the narrator (nameless and faceless because he lacks a sense of real identity) reads a newspaper article about Sonny's arrest for peddling and using drugs, he is forced to accept the fact that Sonny is alive, is still a brother. The narrator comes to feel "sort of responsible" for Sonny's behavior. 171

The news of Sonny’s arrest troubles the narrator while he teaches school. Sitting before him in the classroom are mirror-images of himself and Sonny. I was sure that the first time Sonny had ever had horse, he couldn't have been much older than these hoys were now. These boys, now, were living as we’d been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses: the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone,(87) The young students, like the narrator and his brother, are beginning to make attempts to escape the reality of their present condition by stepping out of actuality through drugs and fantasy. To face reality is the alternative; and one of the students does this when he whistles a blues tune, ”at once very complicated and very simple,” a song that pours “out of him as though he were a bird," a song that sounds "very cool and moving through all that harsh, bright air, only just holding its own through all those other sounds" (88). The hoy's natural blues song is the story's initial suggestion that music provides a message to the world; that if people listen 172 they can see their way through common suffering; and they will understand that art creates meaning and order out of their confusion and disharmony. From the cacophony of life, the young singer creates a song of order and beauty. The schoolteacher in the story becomes a learner. From the blues tune of his student he learns that music is a way of expressing inner and outer reality, and is a medium through which one can transcend personal experience and make the message of human suffering universal. From one of Sonny's friends, who is a bum and a "funky" dope-addict, the schoolteacher learns that every human being, regardless of his educational background, or social position, has "a story of his own" to tell. Sonny's friend comes to the narrator to remind him that, regardless of Sonny's failure, he is his brother's keeper. In his own mind, the schoolteacher remembers his promise to his mother: "I won’t let nothing happen to Sonny" (101). Seven years older than Sonny, the schoolteacher 14 as a youngster tried to play the role of a father. In his childhood Sonny accepts his brother as father- figure, but during adolescence gradually rejects that image. At fourteen Sonny desires to escape Harlem and 173 go to India where he will seek, like the mystics, self-knowledge through self-discipline. But the idea of Sonny’s going to India and "sitting on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, naturally, and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom" strikes the narrator as an absurdist notion. Sonny resents bis brother’s condescending attitude. From his Indian fantasy, Sonny turns to drugs and music as means of escaping or transcending experience in the Harlem ghetto. By using drugs he loses a grip on reality, but by playing the piano he is able to cope with his inner agony. His commitment to achieving excellence in music—his daily practice, his giving up of school—is one strand that keeps Sonny from going under into the oblivion of drugs. As writing saved Baldwin’s life, music helps save Sonny's, keeps him from either killing someone else or committing suicide. Musical expression gives Sonny the feeling that for the first time in his life he is under control of his destiny. It offers him a full-range of self-expression, which is not available to him in a high school classroom: "I ain’t learning nothing at school . . . even when I go" (106). 174

As a father-figure, the narrator wants Sonny to finish high school and become a classical concert pianist; but Sonny, as artist, seeks autonomy, wants to make his own decisions about his career. He determines not only, to drop out of school, but to become a great jazz musician, like , and draw from the grass-roots experience of black people. When the mother of the brothers dies, Sonny feels alone and homeless, and begins treating "other people as though they were his family" (109). He becomes a part of a family of musicians in Greenwich Village. A persistent theme in Baldwin’s short fiction is the need for everyone to belong to a family. With the menacing darkness and confusion of the outside world, each character needs the protection of a family—the kind of protection a child feels when he sits inside his home, having his mother stroke his head. Without the protection and emotional security of the home, the child, as well as the adult, risks destruction. A lesson that the mother of the family teaches her sons is that Sonny, like his uncle who was a musician, can be as easily destroyed in the North as their uncle was in the South. "The world ain't changed," she points out. The love and understanding that one can get from 175 family life is as important for the survival of the individual as it is for the race. When Sonny is in prison for drug abuse, he feels a real need for his brother again, and writes a sympathetic letter which opens up lines of communication between the brothers. When the school­ teacher begins to relate to Sonny as a brother, rather than as a father, communication between them flows freely. When Sonny is released from prison, his brother meets him in New York, and at Sonny’s suggestion, they revisit the “killing streets" of Harlem. Sonny wants to re-establish connection with his past life, the past that he has almost killed himself in trying to escape. Like Sonny, the narrator comes to realize suddenly that when he tore himself from the invisible walls of the ghetto, he left behind some vital part of himself: Some escape the trap, most don’t. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and y leave it in the trap. It must be said, / perhaps, that I had escaped, after all, I / was a schoolteacher; or that Sonny had, he / hadn't lived in Harlem for years. Yet, as the cab moved uptown through streets which 7 seemed, with a rush to darken with dark / people, and as I covertly studied Sonny's / face, it came to me that what we both were / seeking through our separate cab windows / was a part of ourselves which had been lefy 176

behind. It’s always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches.(95) As artist-teacher, Sonny instructs his brother on the outer and inner realities of the human condition. Rather than running from suffering, as he did in the past, Sonny is now using music as a medium of "getting it out—that storm inside" (115). As an adolescent he sought to escape the condition of ghetto life ("I thought I’d die if I couldn’t get away from it"), hut as an adult he realizes that he can leave Harlem, hut inside he is the same person. Self­ acceptance involves facing the positive qualities but also the negative: "Maybe it was good to smell your own stink." Ina metaphorical sense, the schoolteacher smells his own stink when he goes with Sonny and listens to Sonny's blues in a downtown nightclub. There the narrator meets Creole, the large and much older leader of a jazz group, who acts as a father figure. Creole puts his arm around Sonny's shoulder and welcomes him back to the family of musicians, which Sonny has been out of touch with for nearly a year. Creole informs the schoolteacher that Sonny is gifted as a jazz pianist, and tries to cement the 177 bond between the brothers: "You got a real musician in your family" (118). When the narrator finally begins to listen to Sonny’s blues, he suddenly realizes that Sonny has a message in return for that attention: Freedom lurked around us, and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never he free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now. I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in the earth. He had made it his: that long line of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it hack, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it could live forever. I saw my mother’s face again and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father’s brother died. And it brought some­ thing else back, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again, and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched us longer than the sky.(122) Through the medium of music comes the epiphany, and the catharsis. As artist, Sonny interprets the past, reveals the present, and projects the future of black people; his blues serves as a "metaphor of the black 19 community." ' As seen by Robert Bone, Sonny Is a "priest," "a journeyman in suffering," one who is 1 R "intimate with pain." Like the poet—the seer— 178

Sonny preserves in art the cultural heritage of his people. When the schoolteacher realizes that he, too, must face his past, it helps him reconcile himself to his racial heritage. "Sonny’s Blues" celebrates the communion between two'brothers, and the resilience of black Americans. The themes of fear, escape, alienation, loneliness, search for love and understanding, and desire for racial affirmation all come together in "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon. „19 As in "Previous Condition" and "Sonny’s Blues," the central character is a performing artist, an actor-singer, who relates a story about his struggle to achieve manhood. While he was living in the American South in the city of his birth, the narrator felt that his manhood was questioned by the society which held power over him. Growing up in a climate of racial hatred and fear, the narrator did not feel that he could assert himself without endangering his own life. Rather than remain and fight for the human rights of Southern Blacks, the narrator moved North, and then to Paris, Prance, in search of a new identity. As Baldwin did in 1948, the narrator felt a strong need to leave America in • order to develop further as an artist.20 179

Baldwin ended his exile after some ten years in Europe; the narrator, at the beginning of "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon," is about to end his exile after spending twelve years in Paris. Although he lives in another country, he has not been able to erase from his mind the horrifying images of the American South. Like Peter, the narrator has a recurring nightmare about "a heavy man in uniform ... his face • . , red and wet"; the image of a Southern deputy sheriff, like Jesse in "Going to Meet the Man," continues to haunt the narrator. He has spent much of his adult life running from his fears of being beaten or lynched by bigots. When he sets foot on foreign soil, enters the land of a different culture, he feels a sense of 21 freedom never felt before. In Paris he feels that he stands on neutral ground, where there is no need to battle for his humanity. For the first time he does not feel obligated to carry the burdens of race on his shoulders. In Paris he comes to recognize that whites are individuals, with thoughts and feelings of their own. His white associates respected his right to a private life; "they left me alone." The narrator, like Baldwin, falls in love with Paris 180 because "it is the city that saved my life. It saved my life by allowing me to find out who I am" (135)* The neutrality in Paris allows the actor-singer to develop a permanent, healthy relationship with a person of a dissimilar racial background. Unlike Peter and Ruth, the narrator does not allow skin-color to separate him from persons of the opposite sex. He meets and falls in love with Harriet, a native of Sweden, who teaches him to trust other people. "If I had met her in America, I would never have been able to look on her as a woman like all other women. The habits of public rage and power would also have been our private compulsions, and would have blinded our eyes. We would have never been able to love each other" (128). Through the narrator, the author suggests that the Black man needs cessation of the constant hatred in order to love himself and others. Like the narrator of "Sonny’s Blues," the actor- singer builds a strong and loving father-son relationship. Unlike Gabriel Grimes, but like Harriet, his wife, the narrator "does not so much believe in protecting children as the! does in helping them build a foundation on which they can build and build again, each time life’s high-flying 181

steel ball knocks down everything they have built” (123). Unlike Gabriel, he enjoys intimate physical contact with his son, Paul: "I bend down and we kiss each other on the cheek. We have always done so—> but will we be able to do so in America? American fathers never kiss their sons" (131). Again, Baldwin stresses the importance of being reared in a close family unit; disintegration of the family unit results in disorientation in the lives of the characters in several of the short stories. The father wants to provide Paul, who bears the name of his grandfather, a home of security and coherence, which will foster healthy physical and psychological development. The actor-singer is blessed with a close-knit family unit, hut his family does not live in a vacuum; they must also interact with the larger society. During his exile, the narrator realizes his individuality with a right to a private life, but he eventually comes to understand that he is still seen as a black man. Although every individual feels a need for a personal and private entity, he is also a product of his environment: "for everyone's life begins on a level where races, armies, and churches stop. And yet everyone's life is always shaped by 182

races, churches, and armies: races, churches, armies menace, and have taken many lives” (12?). --—~~ It was in Europe that Baldwin discovered for himself what most people already know: that he is, and 21 ~ —— will always be, an American black man. It took the experience in Europe to teach him how very different his philosophy and culture were from those of native 22 Africans. The narrator, too, comes to face the fact of his American-ness in Prance. He finds that he has little in common with the Africans in Paris except for similarities in physical features. He discovers that Boona, a dark-skinned Algerian, who has escaped from his homeland, has become an even greater outcast in Paris. Just as blacks are members of an oppressed minority in America, Boona is a representative of the oppressed African minority in Europe. Out of a sense of desperation he is motivated to steal ten dollars from Ada’s handbag in order to purchase food, but he denies the theft. In the narrator’s attempt to protect Boona one sees the generosity, naivete and trustworthiness of Americans, which contrasts with the wily self-preservation of Europeans, Having to defend a criminal on the basis of his condition and out of a sense of racial identity is one of the dilemmas the 183

narrator faces in. Europe, and which he may have to cope with in America. Not only does the narrator discover that African blacks, detached from their culture, lack a strong sense of identity, hut that American blacks in Europe, like himself, are still searching for their identity. Although the Southern college students touring Paris know little about the cultural traditions of Europeans, as he did twelve years earlier, they respect and carry on the Afro-American folk traditions. He can more strongly identify with the black students than with black Africans, for the Americans are younger mirror images of himself. One of the students, Pete, is a promising guitar player, who reminds one of Sonny’s uncle, the guitar player killed in the South. Pete plays ”If I never, never see you any more/ Preach the word, Preach the word/ I’ll meet you on Canaan's shore”—a black spiritual which is appropriate to the story's theme, separation and reunion. America will be the strange land—the Canaan—in which the narrator will sing a new song. The narrator's elder sister will help him and his family adjust to life in the United States. Just as they are serving as her guide now in her tour of I 184

Paris, Louisa will help her brother re-discover America and will provide orientation for her nephew and sister- in-law, Harriet, who is apprehensive about her family's life in another country. Louisa's face reveals that she is "peculiarly uncertain of herself" and "peculiarly hostile and embattled," but she does not verbally express bitterness toward her native land. Her brother knows that her inner tensions spring from an incident which happened during her adolescence. When she was a girl some white policemen "made her get out and stand in front of the headlights of the car and pull down her pants and raise her dress," to test whether she was a white woman. Following that embarrassing incident, Louisa was unable to face her boyfriend again, and consequently never married. Unlike the narrator, who was beaten by policemen, Louisa chose to remain in the American South and maintain a pinch of dignity in spite of her humiliation. She has emerged as a rather independent woman ("she doesn't like to be protected"), a school­ teacher in Alabama, proud of the achievements of her brother and the cultural contributions of black Americans: "Our culture is as thick as clabber milk," 185 she boasts. As a strong, stable force in the past, Louisa, who functioned as a second-mother to her brother when he was a child, will now provide spiritual support, love and guidance as her exiled brother re-adjusts to his mother country. Implicit in “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” as in the three other stories discussed in this chapter, is that the one medium whereby a black man can view his past, understand his present, and prepare for his future is the medium of art. Distancing himself from the thickening center of reality, the performer can look at himself and the world with a degree of objectivity. Through acting (he has played the role of Chico, a mulatto who hates his parents— and this may be the eventual fate of Paul, the mulatto son of the actor), and singing (particularly songs like ’’When Will I Ever Get to Be a Man” and "Take This Hammer”), the narrator experiences, imaginatively, his own nightmares. He wants to sing Billie Holliday’s "Strange Fruit," a song about Southern lynching, but that song evokes too many horrifying images and causes too much pain for him to deal with emotionally on stage. Eventually, though, as Vidal (his film director) suggests by playing a 186 recording of Mahalia Jackson’s song, "I’m Going to Live the Life I Sing About in my Song," the narrator will have to confront the realities of American life if he is to become culturally whole. Like Sonny, who can identify with jazz instead of classical music, the narrator can play the part of Chico, not as an imitation of "the North Africans I had watched in Paris for so long" (145), but through "the reality behind the reality of his performance" (151). Vidal asks for truth in the performance of the actor, for what good has his period of neutrality in Paris done if he cannot now cope with truth? He has great success in his portrayal of Chico because of his ability to empathize with his fate: Chico has "taken all possible roads to escape and all roads have failed him" (145). Although the narrator-actor-singer is apprehensive about returning to America, he feels that he must face the American experience again. He not only wants to confront the threatening world of his nightmares, hut he also wants his son to experience the realities of life in these United States. Perhaps then Paul will respect and love his father even more as an American black in America; for his father will 187 no longer be one who just sings about and acts out experiences, but one who is bold enough to face these realities. Because the main characters have suffered humiliation in the black community, and are, consequently, made to feel inferior, each has left his or her home in search of a new identity. The central characters in ’’Previous Condition" (1948), "Sonny’s Blues" (1957), "Come Out the Wilderness" (1958)» and "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" (I960), have explored the predominantly white world and have enjoyed its opportunities and have suffered its restrictions: it provides greater economic opportunities, a different range of cultural experiences, and better housing facilities; but in it black men and women are forced to cope with covert and overt bigotry, and take the risk of being exploited sexually. In light of these consequences, the characters eventually re-evaluate their childhood and adolescent experiences in the black world. In their reappraisal of live in the black community, they reach the conclusion that its image is not totally negative: they discover in the black church a music that reflects the spiritual history of 188 the Afro-American experience; they come to appreciate blues and jazz, folk creations of blacks, and find in those forms an archetype of the suffering black man who creates and performs songs that move to the center of the universal human condition; and they discover in the black man’s suffering an indestructible will to live and overcome almost insurmountable obstacles. Contrary to what some readers may expect, the accumulation of wealth is not the main goal of Peter, Sonny, Ruth, or the narrator of "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon"; but rather their goal is to be recognized as human beings with all the rights and privileges afforded to and enjoyed by the white American majority. In their quest to enjoy the blessings of liberty, and their need to be accepted, some have adopted the manners and morals of the dominant society; but, in the end, each character must face one fact: he or she is a black human being, and being black is no disgrace. 189 Notes

x James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 19557, P. 172. ~ 2 James Baldwin, "Previous Condition," in Commentary, 6 (October 1948), 334-42. Citations in the Sext are from Going to Meet the Man (New York: Dell, 1965), PP. 68-857^ ”

In Countee Cullen’s poem, "Incident," the persona relates a similar name-calling scene that has a negative psychological effect. The poem is a popular work which was published in On These I Stand (1925). Jean Wagner discusses "Incident711" 8i n*" *~ BTack Poets of the United States (Chicago, Ill.: University ofIllinois Tress, 19757, PP* 312-13. James Baldwin, "East River, Downtown: Postscript to a Letter from Harlem," in Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell, 1963), p. 73. 5 Richard Wright describes a similar gang fight in "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), rpt. Black Voices (New York: American Library, 19687, ' pp."288-98. Baldwin read Wright’s collection before "Previous Condition" was published; thus, "Ethics" is a possible source. ® Kenneth Stampp, "Make Them Stand in Pear," in The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum gputH' "(New~York?" HTred”A .""Kn'o^ft 195677 PP. 141-91. 7 Bigger Thomas, the hero of Native Son (1940), was portrayed on stage by Richard WngEF"himself • Although Wright at the time was much older than Bigger, he thought that he could best interpret his character. 8 "Throughout his life, at each critical point of development, the black boy is told to hold back, to constrict, to subvert and camouflage his normal masculinity. Male aggressiveness becomes a forbidden fruit, and if it is attained, it must be savored privately," write psychologists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs in Black Rage (New York: Grosset and 190

Dunlap, 1968), pp. 49-50. Achieving manhood, according to Baldwin, and Grier and Cobbs, some twenty years later, is not as easy task for the black American. q 7 Fern Eckman, The Furious Passage of James Baldwin (New York: Popular Library, 1966"), p.96. "I hated and feared the world. And this meant, not only that I thus gave the world an altogether murderous power over me, but also that in such a self­ destroying limbo I could never hope to write," says Baldwin in Notes, p. 7. ■ r Just before Baldwin began his exile in 1948, s/ he was refused service in a Trenton, New Jersey restaurant. Enraged, he screamed and hurled a mug at !\ a waitress. Consequently, he was beaten by a white patron. The incident, described in Notes, pp. 95-98, is strikingly similar to the one tha'€ happens in "Previous Condition." James Baldwin, "Come Out the Wilderness," in Mademoiselle, 46 (March 1958), 102-104, 146-54. Quotations In text taken from Going to Meet the Man, pp. 170-97. 15 James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues," in Partisan Review, 24 (Summer 1957), 327-58; rpt. Going‘"h'o Meeb the Man, pp. 86-122. 14 David Baldwin, the author’s brother, who is i seven years younger, and who has an interest in music V and theater, may he the prototype for Sonny. Like VkDavid, the central character is a high school drop-out; / ' James Baldwin was the only member of his family to complete high school. 15 The amputation metaphor first appeared in Notes, p. 112. A "To remain ’clean* is to keep a distance, possibly to cling to innocence; to stink is to become involved, touching and being touched, and to risk loss of purity or control" is a pattern found in Baldwin’s novels by Charlotte Alexander; see "The ’Stink’ of Reality: Mothers and Whores in James Baldwin’s Fiction," in Literature of Psychology, 18, no. 1 (1968), 191

9-26; rpt. in Keneth Kinnamon’s edition: James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood" Cliffs, N. J.': Pré nt ic e-Hall, 1974), pp. 77-95. 1? John M. Reilly, “'Sonny’s Blues': James Baldwin's Image of the Black Community," in Negro American Literature Forum, 4, no. 2 (1970), 37. "I ft A Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,T965), PP* 215-39. 19 James Baldwin, "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon," in Atlantic, 204 (September I960), 34-52; rpt. Goiflg to Meet the Man, pp. 123-69. on The freedom Baldwin felt in Europe is expressed in "Equal in Paris," in Commentary, 14 (March 1955), 251-59. 21 The author provides a definition of the Afro- American in "Discovery of What It Means to Be an American," in New York Times Book Review (January 25, 1949), PP. 4, 22";' rpt; in Nobody Knows My Name, pp. 17-22. See Harold Isaacs, "Five Writers and Their African Ancestors," in PhvIon, 21 (Fourth Quarter, I960), 317-36. The article discusses Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry's image of and attitude toward Africa as reflected in their literature. Baldwin says that the key to his experience is in America, rather than Africa; but he does not deny his African heritage. 192

An Evaluative Conclusion

In this evaluation three basic assumptions are made: (1) that in his essays, articles and interviews Baldwin announces his intentions as a writer of fiction; (2) that his theory of fiction applies to the short story form as well as to the novel; and (3) that his works of fiction have been created to illustrate and justify his own aesthetic principles. Just as critics have used Edgar Allan Poe’s reviews to measure the literary quality of his short fiction, the approach taken in this study is to evaluate each of Baldwin’s short stories according to the author's own artistic and social standards of literature. As discussed in Chapter 2, since the author's aesthetic has undergone certain modifications in his adult career, each work of short fiction will be evaluated according to principles operative during the period in which each piece was published. Baldwin started his adult literary career by denouncing the propaganda of the naturalistic protest tradition in fiction and praising the art of the realistic tradition in modern fiction. Throughout his career he has called for and has sought to achieve the 193 impression of realism. He has consistently insisted on portraying characters with fidelity and has demanded that authors create events that closely approximate life as it is experienced in the external physical world and felt in the internal states of consciousness. He has always had an abiding respect for the power and beauty of Afro-American folk expression and believes that it is one of the sources of material for the serious artist. In more recent years he has come to recognize a need for a polemic element in fiction, but, at the same time, he has maintained that an artist must uphold some of the traditional literary standards. In ’’Many Thousands Gone” (1951) Baldwin sharply criticizes Richard Wright's Native Son because it reflects, but does not interpret, "the isolation of the Negro within his own group and the resulting fury of impatient scorn." About three years before he made that statement, Baldwin had already published "Previous Condition," which explores the anguish of Peter, a fragmented Afro-American artist-intellectual who suffers from the effects of estrangement not only from black people but from whites as well. It is one of the first short stories written by a black American to interpret the private life of an actor who responds 194

to the demands of the theatre and reacts to the expectations imposed on him by society. As an actor and as a human being, Peter attempts to avoid playing the popular stereotypes of Uncle Tom and the defiant Bigger Thomas, the epitome of black rage. "Previous Condition" is an intense story which provides an interesting psychological study of an alienated man in search of a positive identity in a world that is either hostile or indifferent. Although the main plot covers one day in the principal character’s continuing search for identity and acceptance by others, Baldwin has made effective use of the flashback technique to interpret the nightmare in which Peter struggles against being strangled by a rope, which in a metaphorical sense has been tightening around his neck since childhood. The memory scenes effectively connect Peter’s crises of the past (the discovery of his blackness, the germ of self-hatred, the symbolic struggle against white youth in gang wars) with his problems of the present (the estrangement from the majority of blacks and whites, the lack of self-esteem, the attempts to avoid stereotypic roles, the homelessness and root­ felt by an unhappy wanderer). 195

Although "Previous Condition" was written in anger and published about one month before the author began his exile in Europe, and was drawn from some personal experiences, Baldwin has distanced himself enough from his central character to present Peter as a credible human being with depth and dimension; Peter has not been reduced to a platform polemicist whose only purpose in the story is to serve as the author’s mouthpiece, denouncing the white world and cursing the black one. Even though Peter hates his present condition and expresses his own rage against being treated as a second-class citizen, the story is not essentially a long protest essay disguised as fiction intended to indite America for creating paranoid blacks. Instead of a bitter essay, the author has created a controlled short story portraying a frustrated individual whose plight evokes sympathy from the reader. Even though Baldwin had spent several years of his adult life living among white people in New Jersey and Greenwich Village, his portraits of whites are not as equally convincing as his portrait of Peter. His minor characters, Jules and Ida, are images reflecting the white caricatures of the sympathetic Jew and the 196 emerging American of Irish ancestry. They lack the depth and complexity of human beings living with the tensions produced by the demands of urban communities. The black stereotype which Baldvzin so strongly reacted against in "Everybody’s Protest Novel" (1949) is no better than the white one, for both deny individuals human dimension. As the first story published in Baldwin’s career as an adult literary artist, "Previous Condition" survives as a good piece of fiction. Despite its shallow treatment of white characters, the story shows sophistication in handling the flashback technique, and is skillful in its depiction of an alienated black artist seeking inner peace and fulfillment through his profession. As called for in "Many Thousands Gone," the author’s first story is successful in its capturing the anguish of "double alienation" and its conveying a "sense of Negro life in a continuing and complex reality." Unlike "Previous Condition" Baldwin’s second story "The Death of the Prophet" (1950) is merely a sketch which lacks the artistic qualities displayed earlier. It is the first published story dealing with two members of the Grimes family, neither of whom 197 is clearly drawn or effectively portrayed. The theme of an estranged rebellious adolescent coming of age is an important one in the literature of any race, hut the author’s four-page sketch is much too short to handle that theme adequately. "The Death of the Prophet" is the only story which falters in its use of flashbacks; they are so impressionistic that they do not contribute to the narrative flow of the story, and they do not culminate in the epiphany, which lacks sufficient support in the story's structure. Since readers are being introduced to Johnnie and Gabriel Grimes, the flashbacks should function as exposition, providing background on the conflict between the estranged father and son. But the motivations behind the son’s contempt for his father and his father’s God are not firmly established; thus the emotional effect intended in the epiphany scene is not achieved. The idea of juxtaposing the eighteen-year-old’s initiation into adulthood with his regression into childhood is interesting and offers possibilities in terms of technique, especially in a hospital environment, the setting for sickness and death as well as for birth and renewal. And that is the only artistic quality in the story worth mentioning. 198

Although the sketch was published some seven years after his stepfather’s death, Baldwin seems unable to objectify the experience—to distance himself enough from his personal experiences with Reverend and David Baldwin to produce a first-rate work of art reflecting an emotional autobiographical account. Five years following ’’The Death of the Prophet” the author published "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), a well-disciplined, controlled essay in which Baldwin wrote with an amazing degree of objectivity about his relations with his stepfather and the events surrounding his stepfather’s long period of illness, death, and burial. Confusing in its structure, shallow in its treatment of characters, and undeveloped in its theme, "The Death of the Prophet" is the author’s weakest effort in the area of short fiction. Its statements of direct protest and its sentimental climax stand in direct contrast to Baldwin’s denouncement of those elements in "Everybody’s Protest Novel," published just a year before the story appeared in print. One does not wonder why the story was not included in his collection, Going to Meet the Man, because such a 199 story certainly would have detracted from the overall quality of that collection. Unlike "The Death of the Prophet," but similar to "Previous Condition," Baldwin’s third story "The Outing" is a faithful demonstration of the artistic principles boldly set forth in "Everybody's Protest Novel" and "Many Thousands Gone," essays attacking the protest tradition in fiction.VThe strength of "The Outing" (1951) does not derive from the impulse to protest a condition in society, but from the story's development of themes and characters. The author is skillful in his weaving together the themes of search for emotional security, ambivalence toward the father and the church, and ambivalence toward homosexual relations. Drawing from his personal experiences, Baldwin handles the familiar themes with authority, with a fidelity to reality, and with such freshness that the story excites the imagination. It is a tightly structured story which, with subtle suggestion, introduces the theme of homosexuality among black adolescents—perhaps the first short story written by an Afro-American to deal with that controversial theme in fiction. The homosexual suhtheme is so subtly 200 presented that one is very perceptive to notice it on the first reading. The young adolescent with homosexual tendencies is presented not as a flamboyant sissy stereotype, but as a credible flesh-and-bone character with whom the average reader can sympathize. "The Outing1' in theme and character anticipates the homosexual and bisexual characters developed more fully in Giovanni's Room (1955), Another Country (1962), and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968). Although one may find the subject distasteful, one must admire the author’s boldness in dealing with it in the early 1950’s when anti-homosexual prejudice was much stronger than it is today. "The Outing" is not only rich in its themes but presents several memorable characters, each individualized and each interesting. First, there is the adolescent triangle: David, the aggressive youth among his peers, the shy youth before his elders, who is ambivalent toward homosexual love, but is infatuated by the attractive and gentle Sylvia; Johnnie, lonely, sensitive boy who has a homosexual attraction for handsome David; and Roy, the bold, forceful heterosexual who delights in clownish vulgarity, who deceives the elders of the church but 201 is honest with his peers. Lois, the sister to the Grimes brothers, is an alienated and frustrated youngster who is not old enough to associate with the adult saints, and too self-righteous to interact with the adolescent sinners; she sharply contrasts with Sylvia, who enjoys the fellowship with church members and the admiration and respect of lost sinners; she is a believer who avoids the dangers of religious fanaticism. < In "Many Thousands Gone"/Baldwin says that the 'black'wfiter^should^attempt to articulate the traditions of the race. One of the traditions recreated in "The Outing" grows out of the ritual of / the fundamentalist church. The story celebrates the power and beauty of a down-home worship service: the short effective folk sermon, the emotionally moving testimony, the vivid description of the holy dancing, the descriptions of the inner feelings of the saints and sinners and their spiritual transformations, and the catalog of stock expressions used by the holy- ghost folk—all of these are handled with the expertise of a person intimately familiar with the fiery church meetings of emotional fundamentalists. In its intensity "The Outing" equals, if not surpasses, 202

James Weldon Johnson’s vivid description of a revival meeting among black Southerners in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and anticipates the unforgettable passages in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) in which the spirit knocks the worshipers upright from the altar. With Michael Joseph, one must agree that Baldwin handles the characters objectively—"the observation at once disinterested and involved, permits the characters precisely the independence that makes for artistic life." The story is an excellent example of the author’s call for aesthetic distance—the narrator describes the characters and events with an objectivity never before seen in Baldwin’s fiction. In the story there is a delicate balance between the descriptions of the external dramatic experiences and the emotional internal impulses of principal characters. One artistically sound story, "The Outing/ is followed by another, "Sonny’s Blues" (1957), which over the years has become Baldwin’s most popular story. It is a blues tale celebrating the resilience of black Americans in a country that threatens to dehumanize them. It is an excellent demonstration of 203 the ironic survival of the race; the author marvels about the strong will of oppressed people to survive in "The Harlem Ghetto," an essay published in Commentary (February 1949): I can conceive no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life. All over Harlem, Negro hoys and girls are moving into stunted maturity, trying to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive. In “Sonny’s Blues" the theme of suffering and survival of an oppressed people is skillfully presented in eight movements. Through a series of flashbacks— which function as movements—the story presents the central character’s attempt to escape the pains of his past life in Harlem through mysticism, heroin, military service and musical expression, while his intellectual schoolteacher brother seeks to understand his brother’s and his own motivations. As in "The Outing," which dramatizes the differences between Roy and Johnnie Grimes, "Sonny’s Blues" contrasts the personalities of two brothers. Although both are products of the Harlem environment and have spent the years of their adult life in flight from that community, each has a different motivation 204 for avoiding the realities of his childhood and adolescent life in the ghetto. While Sonny left Harlem seeking to escape the hard drugs that have plagued that large urban community for decades, his brother fled Harlem trying to avoid the psychological effects of the poverty cycle which threaten to ensnare him. While Sonny has chosen to be a jazz pianist who expresses the ethos and agony of his people through his musical compositions, his brother has become a schoolteacher, an intellectual who attempts to escape emotional involvement with Sonny and other grass-roots black people. And while Sonny loves and respects the cultural heritage of the folk, his brother carries contempt for the cultural traditions of the common people. "Sonny's Blues" is one of the first stories written by a black American to deal with the theme of drug addiction in the urban North. Communities like Harlem have been fighting the trafficking of drugs for several decades, but little attention was given to the drug abuse problem until the 1960‘s when white youth started using hard drugs more than ever before. Baldwin’s effective handling of the theme in the middle 1950's anticipates such longer works as Claude 205

Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). ’’Sonny’s Blues” is also one of the earliest short stories to explore the private life of a jazz musician who has genuine talent, but who is misunder­ stood by , and whose contribution to the field of music has escaped the attention of a popular audience and the mass media. Like Peter in "Previous Condition," Sonny is a metaphor for the black artist who takes his career seriously and stands in need of being discovered and encouraged as he develops his craft. Although Sonny's position as an artist parallels Baldwin’s experience as a struggling writer striving to be heard during the 1940's, the author maintains aesthetic distance in the story. As Joseph Peatherstone strongly emphasized in his review, the story is not an essay designed to plead Sonny's case to the world. As the editors of Lark Symphony comment, "Sonny’s Blues" is a "particularly powerful story, for it suggests the frailty of Sonny without making him seem pathetic" (300), A story reflecting the tendency of the non-heroic in modern fiction, a story not filled with racial 206 hatred that offers no solution, a tender but painful story about brothers struggling to better understand each other and comprehend their cultural past and connect it with the conditions of the uncertain present, ’’Sonny’s Blues” is one of Baldwin’s finest achievements in short fiction. His control of theme and character shows artistic excellence in the short story form. In "Notes of a Native Son" Baldwin calls for works of fiction that deal directly with the ironies, dilemmas, paradoxes and ambiguities of black life in America, which throughout her history has been rather schizophrenic toward the black man’s presence. "Come Out the Wilderness" (1958) is one story which is effective in handling some of the inconsistencies in American life. The story takes the reader on a through the private life of Ruth Bowman who has journeyed to the wilderness where Sonny plays the blues, and has since become lost there. The several flashbacks reveal the inner life of Ruth as she struggles to achieve womanhood in a male-dominated society. Her past experiences with men have all ended in disappointment, and the old joy of her present affair has turned to 207 new grief. A study of self-pity, self-hatred, scorn, humiliation, paranoia, ambivalence, and loneliness, "Come Out the Wilderness" is one of the saddest blues tales ever told. Baldwin explores the lower depths of mental and moves us closer to a better understanding of the shades of despair and anguish through this introspective blues piece. As some black women short fiction writers have portrayed female characters—for example Zora Neale Hurston’s portrait of Missie May Banks in "The Gilded Six-Bits" (1933); Anne Petry's May in "Like a Winding Sheet" (194-5); Paule Marshall’s Reena in "Reena" (1962); and Shirley Williams' Martha in "Tell Martha Not to Moan" (1968)—Baldwin has presented Ruth Bowman realistically and sympathetically. Through her reflections of her past, she gains new insight into the wilderness of confusion and contempt of the present; but the story ends ambiguously with the central character ending up in a bar drinking and planning (like Peter). Ruth is aware of her alternatives, and Baldwin does not choose one for her by providing a neat little resolution at the end of the story. As in other stories, the author creates a sense of "life as a continuing and complex reality." 208

According to Baldvzin, creative writers should "bring a little light to suffering. We don’t change anything; all we can do is invest people vzith the morale to change it for themselves." Like "Previous Condition," "Come Out the Wilderness" deals with the subtheme of interracial sexual relations, which was written about rarely until the decade of the 1960’s, (Paule Marshall was later to deal with the theme in "Reena.") Although Baldwin presents the black woman convincingly, he does not create a vivid portrait of Paul, the white artist. Like the sex-oriented Ida in the former story, the art-oriented Paul does not come alive, lacks a human dimension. But to he remembered is the fact that the story is related from the point of view of Ruth, who has some strong prejudices against Paul. "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" (I960) gives a more sympathetic view of white people.. Harriet is a credible character who loves her husband and her son and tries to understand the forces that have shaped her mate. Vidal is a sympathetic character who has seen his family disintegrate, and who devotes his energy to producing excellent films. 209

The story is another very good illustration of a theme mentioned in "Many Thousands Gone": "We cannot escape our origins, however hard we may try, those origins which contain the key—could we but find it—to all that we later become." Like Peter, Sonny, and Ruth, the narrator reflects on the past and reveals through flashbacks the roots of his nightmares, which grow out of his fear of the American South. The narrator, who is a successful actor and singer, has attempted to escape his origins, hut through experience learns that he is an American. The narrator’s confession parallels the author’s in "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American," which was published one year before "This Morning." "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" is one of the few short stories on the theme of the dilemma of the black expatriate artist. If the narrator stays in Europe some people will accuse him of "treason by refusing to be identified with the misery of my people" and by identifying himself "with those who were responsible for this misery." If he returns to America he will be forced to deal with race prejudice not only against himself, but also his mulatto son and his white wife. 210

Like his powerful polemic essays on race relations, Baldwin’s "This Morning" contains some commentary on the warping effect of racism in America. Although it comments on bigotry, the story does not subordinate the development of a thesis to the delineation of character. The author is more concerned with the ironies in the life of the actor-singer than in constructing a diatribe against race prejudice in the South. ~ T^Baldwinbestdescribes'are and people that he is most familiar with—the Harlem world, the bohemian life in Greenwich Village, the social life in Paris. Because he was not intimately acquainted with Southern life before the story’s publication, he avoided trying to describe it. Although the narrator is a Southerner and spends about three months there during his mother’s funeral, he relates only a sketchy account of what took place there. This may be viewed as one of the story’s shortcomings, but the author was wise to leave the unfamiliar territory out of his story. Critic Dennis Donoghue asserts that along with "Sonny’s Blues," "This Morning" is "far better than anything else Baldwin has done in fiction." And in "James Baldwin: The Black and the Red-White-and-Blue" 211

(1963) John V. Hagopian says the story "is a work which deserves to take its place as one of the most important short stories written since the war, not only because the theme of the Negro girding himself to take his rightful place in American society is significant in our postwar cultural history, but because as literature it is a very fine piece of work," In terms of development of this interesting theme and delineation of the central character, one must agree that the story Is one of Baldwin’s outstanding artistic achievements. The underlying fear of the South hinted at in "This Morning" emerges as the dominant emotion in "Going to Meet the Man" (1965). Like the author’s controversial, disturbing, brutal and stabbing Blues for Mister Charlie (1964)—a play which is based on the murder case of 1955—the story is an angry piece of social protest which vents Baldwin’s spleen. In the story he was able to deal dramatically with his own almost pathological fear of Southern white authority figures, mentioned several times in Nobody Knows My Name (1961) always in a castrating or murdering role. 212

The short story, dealing boldly and explicitly with the theme of racism and the sexual insecurity of a Southern white deputy sheriff, is intended as a disturber of the peace of the often silent and sometimes violent majority. Baldwin aims for an emotional effect when he presents Jesse as sexually inferior to and dependent on blacks. The strong connection suggested in the story between bigotry, fear, and sexual impotency disturbs reviewer Dennis Donoghue, who dismisses it as "a sadistic sexual fantasy.” It also upsets Seymour Krim who says that the story is "a slice of agit-prop.” By evoking such emotions in these and other reviewers, "Going to Meet the Man," which one must agree is fantasy and propaganda, achieves the author’s dramatic intent. In "The Northern Protestant" (I960) Baldwin encourages the artist to "vomit the anguish up. All of it, the literal and the fanciful." And taking his own advice, he has regurgitated the agony of his race in his short story. If one objects to his portrayal of the deputy sheriff, one must give the author credit for creating a vivid and unforgettable lynching- castration-burning scene. If one compares that scene with similar stories like "The lynching of Jube Benson" 213

(1904) by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and "Blood-Burning Moon" (1923) by Nathan Eugene Toomer, and such poems as "The Lynching" (1922) by Claude McKay and "" (1935) by Richard Wright, he must conclude that Baldwin’s detailed description of the agony and torture of the black victim is more vivid and emotionally moving. It is perhaps the best description of its kind in American fiction. Michael Joseph declares that "Going to Meet the Man" is powerful, persuasive fiction which evokes almost mystic significance. He is impressed with the author’s inside view of Jesse, the only white adult in Baldwin’s short fiction whose inner feelings are revealed explicitly. The author examines what he believes to be the cause of racial injustice in the South (sexual insecurity) and one of its effects (ambivalence and sadism). Who can prove that racism and its violent manifestations do not spring from inner psycho-sexual needs? One of the most sympathetic portraits of a Southern sheriff is found in Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s story "The ¿Sheriff’s Children" (1899) in which a lawman attempts to save his mulatto son from a lynch mob. Unlike the makers of popular films of the 1960’s 214 which exploited the stereotype of the Southern sheriff, Chesnutt reveals the consciousness of Campbell in a racial dilemma. He invests his character with more depth and dimension than Baldwin’s character, who is a sexual being lacking moral conscience. Published during the social revolution of the 1960’s, the story grows out of social rather than purely artistic concerns, Baldwin’s major purpose is to arouse emotion and thought—to force Americans "to reexamine a way of life,” as he points out in "A Fly in Buttermilk” (1958). The author has contributed this thesis story (a historical reminder of former brutality) as a stimulus to the , as encouragement to the thousands of demonstrators jailed to continue struggling and to keep the faith. The protest songs that hold the story together thematically offer inspiration to the weary and announce the end to oppression. In Soul on Ice (1968) Eldridge Cleaver accuses Baldwin of creating works "void of a political, economic, or even a social reference." "Going to Meet the Man" no doubt had escaped Cleaver’s attention, for it, like many of Richard Wright’s works, reveals the black rage resulting from institutional racism. Although the 215 story, in the view of some critics, is flawed by its blend of propaganda with art, it achieves its purpose as a good piece of social literature aimed at triggering an emotional effect. In "The Man Child" (1965) Baldwin moves from an emphasis on thesis to a concern with character delineation and thematic development. Reviewer Oscar Handlin argues that it is the only story in Going to Meet the Man in which the "characters come alive," The chief characters in every story in the volume are vital and credible; one wonders whether Handlin has given the stories a close reading! The development of the principal characters is remarkable. Throughout the story one feels a nearness to Eric, the eight-year-old son from whose point of view the characters and events are related. One moves with him as he vacillates between dependence upon his mother and independence in the natural environment. One feels this curious child’s fear of the threatening outsider, and feels the hands of his murderer tighten around his neck, following the stylized initiation scene. Baldwin provides an interesting external view of the adults: Eric’s father, who is extremely proud of his son and his heritage, who uses his best friend 216 as a foil, satisfying masochistic drives; Eric’s mother, a peacemaker in the home, who is compassionate, yet ambivalent toward the outsider, and who is slowly dying of consumption; and Jamie, the lonely, frustrated wanderer and dreamer who nourishes a homosexual fantasy. Perhaps because he feels that the story does not supply sufficient motivation for the murder, Daniel Stern dismisses it as "an unbelievable story of unbelievable violence." When one reads newspaper accounts almost daily about men murdering children for no justifiable reason, he is not so quick to call Baldwin’s story pure fantasy. Although it is true that Jamie’s motivations are not explicitly handled, the story implies that he is driven to violence by his attempt to break his isolation from the beloved. Such acts of violence, which may be viewed as absurd, occasionally happen in our high-tension society. The story not only shows some sophistication in handling character but also theme and technique. The themes of Initiation into the masculine values of society, the estrangement between heterosexual and homosexual, and the envy and desperation of an outcast are effectively woven together, making an interesting 21? pattern. The images of the setting sun, the dominant leitmotif, and the falling apples in autumn, parallel the image of the dying son; the hopefulness of the father contrasts with the hopelessness of the mother; the sexual potence of the father contrasts with the spiritual impotence of Jamie; the aging of Jamie contrasts with the youthfulness of Eric; and the birthday of an adult is juxtaposed with the deathday of a child. The story’s title is just as ironic as the characters, reflecting the adult-like ambitions of Eric, and the child-like fantasies of Jamie. As in "The Outing" Baldwin presents the homosexual as a sympathetic character in "The Man Child." Driven by an insulting society (personified by Eric’s father), Jamie restrains himself from violence until the very end of the story. Like Poe’s "Cask of Amontillado," Baldwin’s story does not contain poetic justice; the reader is left to imagine the consequences of the murder. One cannot forget Jamie, the paranoid homosexual in search of love and sexual security. Although "The Man Child” demonstrates the author’s ability to write about the experiences of white people with amazing objectivity, avoiding the 218

urge of the social protest tradition, "The Rockpile" (1965) illustrates, once again, that Baldwin writes with more authority and persuasion about the personal experiences of urban black Americans. The story effectively captures the tensions of a black family cramped in a Harlem kitchenette apartment building, in an environment that is emotionally explosive. As Irving Howe generalizes in "James Baldwin: At Ease in Apocalypse" (1968), "the single strong and authentic affection he [Baldwin! can dramatize is that between brothers trapped together in a slum, despairing of their parents and the world, drawn into a web of incestuous defense." Baldwin has drawn from the tensions of his early childhood experience to create a deeply moving and ’ richly human story, which is clearly related from the - vantage point of a child who dearly loves his protective mother, but has a terrible dread of and ambivalent feelings toward his stern and threatening father. As is evident in "Sonny’s Blues" and "The Outing," Baldwin shows his mastery of developing sharp j contrasts in "The Rockpile" between the thoughts and actions of two brothers, one frail, timid, and 219 obedient, while the other is healthy, aggressive, and rebellious. The story is effectively structured, revealing the restrictions of children in a Christian home—its unifying theme—in three measured movements: an introduction or exposition section reveals the inner longing of two brothers for different experiences in the secular world, and the warning of the mother against exploring the potentially dangerous world, symbolized by the rockpile; the second movement, which comes in a flashback scene, focuses on the drowning of a young boy who dies while out of the protection of his parents—hence reinforcing the warning mentioned in the opening scene, and foreshadowing the possible fate of Roy, who rejects being protected each moment; and the closing section presents a dramatic incident which actualizes the consequences of disobedience to parental authority through Roy’s symbolic struggle on the rockpile and his injury—his scar being a mark of lived experience. The last movement also contains an epiphany: the doting father suddenly realizes his ambivalence toward his wife, who boldly challenges his authority to punish innocent Johnnie. 220

True to the form of the short story, "The Rockpile" in ten pages develops an intense experience. As Baldwin told Nikki Giovanni, the artist should strive to release the energy of the "living word"— and the economy of language exhibited in this brief and lyrical story demonstrates the author’s skill in making each word count, as does every good poem. "I’m a kind of poet • . . responsible to the people who produced me," Baldwin said. A revision of "Roy’s Wound" (1952)—a sketch which contains social protest (curses against the hostile white world), and physical violence between the parents, and Roy’s curse of his father—"The Rockpile" is a definite improvement over the original story. While the former story is merely an impressionistic sketch which shows the external effects of violence, the latter presents an external and internal view of black people who seek to resolve a family problem. Again Baldwin demonstrates that he can use personal experience as a source of material and write about those experiences with aesthetic distance. "The Rockpile" is an excellent work of art. In terms of its development of theme, its structure, its delineation of character, its control of point of view, 221 and its economy of language, it shows Baldwin’s mastery of the short story form, and it will survive through the ages as a concise statement about the universal human condition. It is clear from the foregoing that in several of his works Baldwin has dramatized his own persona as a major component in fiction. True to his own personal experience, over half of his short stories transmute the psychic wounds of the blues, which Ellison in Shadow and Act supplies an operational definition for: The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details of episodes of brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal expressed lyrically. " "Previous Condition," "The Death of the Prophet," "The Outing," "Sonny’s Blues," "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon," and "The Rockpile," are autobiographical blues tales which interpret with power and authority the causes and effects of human suffering in the twentieth century. Like the folk blues singer, Baldvzin has found in the near-tragic, near-comic experiences of the race an archetype of the human condition. His works of short fiction portray the 222

conditions, fears, and aspirations of suffering humanity with honesty and integrity. •'Come Out the Wilderness,” "The Man Child" and "Going to Meet the Man" demonstrate that Baldwin can imagine situations unlike his own and characters different from himself. Although Dennis Donoghue and a few other critics object to his portrayal of white characters, at least Baldwin has sought to imagine and interpret what the life of a white child, father, homosexual, and deputy sheriff may be like for those individuals. One must admit, however, that he portrays black characters with more fidelity than he does white ones. Obviously, he has never been a black woman, but he shows his power of imagination when he creates suffering and confused Ruth, who is credible. X"^"' Baldwin musHalso be given credit for exploring X themes and providing studies of characters that have ,either been totally neglected or written about rarely in fiction. His stories investigate the private lives of performing artists and reveal their problems of estrangement and identity; deal with the anguish of a black woman seeking to achieve womanhood and find love in a plastic wilderness; reveal the motivations for bigotry in an ambivalent sheriff; present a view of the 223 adolescent black and the adult white homosexual in an indifferent or hostile environment; and dramatize the inner tensions of black youth reared in a restricted religious home. His stories present in capsule form the thematic concerns reflected in his essays and explored at length in his novels. Almost all of his stories show a sure sense of the short story form by presenting a moment of illumination that has significance for the total life of the central character. Except for "The Outing," which uses the shift in scene technique (similar to the motion picture camera panoramic effect) and which is chronological in structure, the other stories evidence the flashback technique. Baldwin shows sophistication in handling the flashback to reveal theme and character motivation in each story except his fragment, "The Death of the Prophet." The technique is successful in revealing complexity in situation and character, and shows that present psychological problems spring from complex sociohistorical conditions. Baldwin’s fiction effectively illustrates and justifies his own aesthetic. A few critics, for example, complain because several of his stories do not resolve conflict. Apparently, they are unaware of or 224 simply have chosen to ignore the author’s expressed intention to present characters in a "continuing complex" reality. To avoid facile resolution, the author has consciously made the endings of his stories ambiguous; thus they may appear to have an unfinished quality. As a writer of fiction Baldwin shows considerable mastery of form in his shorter works. Most critics agree that Go Tell It on the Mountain, his masterpiece, and If Beale Street Could Talk, his latest achievement, bring out the best in Baldwin as a novelist. Both of those works are brief, less than 200 pages long. And his skillful handling of theme, character, and technique in his shorter novels as well as his short stories adds credence to the notion that Baldwin has better control of form in shorter works of fiction than in his longer ones, Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, which several critics have judged awkward and raw. One is safe in arguing that the author's forte lies in the novella and short story, where he has demonstrated brilliance. It has been a decade since Baldwin published his collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man, which is similar in tone and content to Jean Toomer’s 225

Cane, the undisputed masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. Apparently still sticking to his ambition to be remembered as a novelist, he has not published a short story in ten years. His collection, however, is still in print and sells thousands of copies each year; several of the stories have also been reprinted in standard anthologies of contemporary literature. Students of literature all over the world read and enjoy his stories, and wait on more stories by Baldwin, who is a perceptive interpreter of the human condition in our volatile age. 226

Bibliography

Primary Works and Books

Baldwin, James. Amen Corner, New York: Dial Press, 1968. " . Blues for Mister Charlie. New York: Dial ------Tress?”I9637------. ’’Death of the Pronhet," Commentary, 9 (March 1950), 257-61.* • ”Gide as Husband and Homosexual,” The New deader (Dec. 13, 1954), 18-20. . Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: ------IlfreH AT7nöpf“l9T.------______. Going to Meet the Man. New York: Dell, 1965. . James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni: A Dialogue. - "“‘"New fork: "J.'”BLippincott, 1973» ” . “Many Thousands Gone*" Partisan Review, 17 (November-December, 1951), 565-5Ö5 • ’’Mass Culture and the Creative Artist,’’ Daedalus, 89 (Spring I960), 373-76. • No Name in the Street. New York: Dial Press, T972-. . Notes of a Native Son. Boston, Mass.: Deacon Press,"T9557 ; j • ’’The Creative Dilemma.” Saturday Review, 47 “(Feb. 8, 1964), 14-15, 58. ““ . The Fire Next Time. New York: Dell, 1963* Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Üniv. Press“,'T9S57 227

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Selected Poems. New York: Harper and Row, 1963. ' ~ Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: Dell, 1968. Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower. Washington, D.C.: Howard Umv?" Press, T9747 Eckman, Fern. The Furious Passage of James Baldwin. New York: Populär. Library? ±966. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. • Fiedler, Leslie. The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler, I. New York: Stein an3 Säy,'"1971. Gayle, Addison. The Black Aesthetic. New York: Douhleday, 1971. Gold, Herbert, ed. Fiction of the Fifties. New York: Douhleday, 1959? Grier, William H., and Price M. Cobbs. Black Rage. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1968. Gross, Theodore. The Heroic Ideal in American Literature. New York? The Free Press,"1971. Gross, Theodore, and James A. Emanuel, eds. Dark Symphony. New York; Macmillan, 1968, Heilbrum, Carolyn G. Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. New York: Harper and Sow,“1973. Hill, Herbert, ed. Black Voices. London, 1964. Howe, Irving. The Decline of the New. New York: Harcourt,Trace ancPWorlcf, 1976. Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro. New York: Antheneum, 1925. Redding. Jay Saunders. To Make a Poet Black. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina" Press, 1939. 228

Render, Sylvia Lyons. The Short Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt. Washington/‘D.C"Èoward’Tlniv. Tïeïïïï7“I974. Stampp, Kenneth. The Peculiar Institution. New York: Alfred’“Â7 Knopf/ 1956. ' Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States, trans. Kenneth Douglas. "Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1973. Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper and Row, 1940. —

Articles, Bibliographies, and Anthologies

Alexander, Charlotte. "The ‘Stink* of Reality: Mothers and Whores in James Baldwin's Fiction." Literature of Psychology, 18, no. 1 (1968),

Ames, Russell. "Social Realism in Charles W. Chesnutt." Phylon, 13 (Second Quarter, 1953), 199-206. ----- Baraka, Imamu Amiri. "The Black Aesthetic." Black World, 18 (September 1969), 5-6. Bigsby, Christopher E. W. "The Committed Writer: James Baldwin as Dramatist." Twentieth Century Literature, 13 (April 1967), 39-48.' Bluefarb, Sam. "James Baldwin’s ’Previous Condition’: A Problem of Identification." Negro American Literature Forum, 3 (1969), 26-297*” Charley, Maurice. "James Baldwin’s Quarrel with Richard Wright." American Quarterly, 1-5 (Spring 1963), 65-75: Davis, Charles T. "Jean Toomer and the South: Region and Race Elements within a Literary Imagination." Studies in Literary Imagination, 7 (Fall 1974), 23^577“ ' ~ ’ 229

'Fisher, Russell G, "James Baldwin: A Bibliography, • 1947-62." Bulletin of Bibliography, 24 (1965), 127-30. Fleming, Robert E. "Contemporary Themes in Johnson’s ’Autobiography of an Éx-Coïored Man.”’ Negro American Literature Forum, 4 (1970), 120-24."“ Gloster, Hugh M, "Charles W. Chesnutt: Pioneer in the Fiction of Negro Life." Phylon, 2 (First Quarter, 1941), 57-66. Hagopian, John V. "James Baldwin: The Black and the Red-White-and-Blue." College Language Association Journal, 7, no. 2 ‘(December 1973), ------Hernton, Calvin C. "A Fiery Baptism." ' Amistad, 1 (I97O), 200-14. Howe, Irving. "James Baldwin: At Ease in Apocalypse." Harper’s, 237 (September 1968), 92, 95-100. Isaacs, Harold. "Five Black Writers and Their African Ancestors." Phylon, 21 (Fourth Quarter, I960), 317-36. Kent, George, "James Baldwin and the Problem of Being." College Language Association Journal, 7 (1964) , 213 » Kindt, Kathleen A. "James Baldwin: A Checklist, 1947-62." Bulletin of Bibliography, 24 (1965), 123-26. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. ‘"Englewood ClifTs, U.J.: Pren5ice-HaTl7”1974. Meserve, Walter. "James Baldwin’s ’Agony Way.”’ The Black American Writer, ed. C. W. E. Bigsby. Baltimore, Md. : Penguin, 1971. Ognibene, Elaine R. "Black Literature Revisited: •Sonny’s Blues.”’ English Journal, 60 (January 1971), 36-377 - 230

Reilly, John M. ’’’Sonny’s Blues’: James Baldwin’s Image of the Black Community.” Negro American Literature Forum, 4 (1970), 56-66. “ Ross, Stephen M. ’’Audience and Irony in Johnson’s •Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.’” College Language Association Journal, 18 (December T9747/I9S=2I6?------Standley, Fred L. "James Baldwin: 1963-67." Bulletin of Bibliography, 25 (1968), 135-36. Thume, Ensaf, and Ruth Pigozy, eds. Short Stories: A Critical Anthology. New York: KacmilTan, 1973? SyTolson, Melvin B. "The Poet’s Odyssey." Anger and / Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, ed, Herbert Sill. "New’York:~Sarper~and. Sow,“ 1966. j Turner, Darwin T., comp. Afro-American Writers. Goldentree Bibliographies Series? ed. O'. "B. Harrison, Jr. New York: Appleton-Gentury-Crofts, 1970. Turner, Darwin T., ed. Black American Literature. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill',.1970. Turner, Darwin T. ”W. E. B. DuBois and the Theory of a Black Aesthetic." Studies in the Literary Imagination, 7 (Fall 1974)’,"”l-kl•

Book Reviews

Anon. Booklist, 70 (July 1, 1974), 1179. Carley, Arthur. Library Journal, 99 (July 1, 1974), 1057. ~ Davenport, Guy. National Review, 20 (July 16, 1968), 701. ~ Donoghue, Denis. "Blues for Mister Baldvzin." New York Review of Books, 5 (Dec. 9» 1965), 6. 251

Peatherstone, Joseph. "Blues for Mister Baldwin." New Republic, 155 (November 27, 1965), 54. Gosgrave, Mary Silva. Hornbook, 50 (October 1974), 158. Handlin, Oscar. Atlantic Monthly, 216 (November 1965), 191. Hicks, Granville. New York Times (October 14, 1956), 5* Joseph, Michael. "Love, 0 Sweet Love." Times Literary Supplement (October 28, 1965), 54-567“ Krim, Seymour. "The Troubles He's Seen." Bookweek, 5 (November 9, 1965), 5. Oates, Joyce Carol. The New York Times Book Review (May 19, 1974),"1327 ' “ Simon, John. "Blues for Mister Baldwin." Hudson Review, 17 (Autumn 1964), 421. Stern, Daniel. "A Special Corner on Truth." Saturday Review (November 6, 1965), 52. Thompson, John. "Baldwin: The Prophet as an Artist." Commentary, 45 (June 1968), 67-69• Webster, Ivan. New Republic, 170 (June 15, 1974), 25-26. — ""