BOOKS
JAMES BALDWIN : VOICE OF A REVOLUTION
THE FIRE NEXT TIME. By J"mes B"ldwin. Di,,1. $3.50.
It
is on the whole encouraging that James Baldwin should
have become the voice of American Negroes, because he is also the voice
of an American consciousness (conscience) which is not Negro. The
word "home" occurs frequently in his writings, sometimes bitterly,
sometimes quite ordinarily: and by it he means America, in spite of his
being acutely aware that the white men of his country have never
shared their home with the Negroes. James Baldwin is an American
writer, regarded and criticized as such, one of the outstanding living
writers in the English language. His very faults as a writer and a
person-given the fact of his immense distinction as both-strengthen
his position, because he can be criticized and argued with as a man
who is neither black nor white, but who uses, and exists, within the
English language. As a writer, he has no color, but only mind and
feelings as they are realized in words. One can quarrel, for example, with
his misuse of words like "precisely" and "strictly" (usually introduced
at a place where his argument is most blurred). James Baldwin is neither
the golden-voiced god who sometimes descends on us from a black
cloud-like those Negro athletes or Paul Robeson in his prime-nor is
he a poet from another race and sphere of life-like Langston Hughes–
for whom allowances have to be made. He is simply a writer in
English who has had imposed on him by circumstances a point of
view made tragic by those very circumstances. All his writings are
speeches out of the play which is the tragedy of his race.
Baldwin's power is his ability to express situations-the situation of
being a Negro, and of being white, and of being human. Beyond this,
he is perhaps too impatient to be a good novelist, and although he is
a powerful essayist, his experiences are so colored with feelings that
he seems unable
to
relate the thoughts which arise from his feelings to
parallel situations that have given rise to other men's thoughts. Thus
it seems important to him in his feelings about American Negroes that
he should write as though there were no other Negroes, no other
oppressed peoples anywhere in the world. He states: "Negroes do not,
r.
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