THEATER, ETC,
391
demonstrated is not the social guilt of the whites, but their inferiority
as human beings. This means, above all, their sexual inferiority. While
Richard jeers about his unsatisfying experiences with white women up
North, it turns out that the only passions--in one instance carnal, in
the other romantic-ever felt by the two white men who figure im–
portantly in the play, Lyle and Parnell, have been with Negro women.
Thus, the oppression by whites of Negroes becomes a classic case of
ressentiment
as described by Nietzsche. It is eerie to sit in the ANTA
Theatre on 52nd Street and hear that audience- sizably Negro, but still
preponderantly white--cheer and laugh and break into applause at
every line cursing white America. After all, it's not some exotic Other
from across the seas who is being abused-like the rapacious Jew or the
treacherous Italian of the Elizabethan drama. It is the majority of the
members of the audience themselves. Social guilt would not be enough
to explain this remarkable acquiescence of the majority in their own
condemnation. Baldwin's plays, like his essays and novels, have un–
doubtedly touched a nerve other than political. Only by tapping the
sexual insecurity that grips most educated white Americans could Bald–
win's virulent rhetoric have seemed so reasonable.
But after applause and cheers, what? The masks which the Eliza–
bethan theatre proposed were exotic, fantastic, playful. Shakespeare's
audience did not come streaming out of the Globe Theatre to butcher
a Jew or string up a Florentine. The morality of
The Merchant of Venice
is not incendiary, but merely simplifying. But the masks which
Blues for
Mister Charlie
holds up for our scorn are our reality. And Baldwin's
rhetoric
is
incendiary, though let loose in a carefully fireproofed situation.
The result is not any idea of action-but the vicarious pleasure in the
rage vented on the stage, with no doubt an undertow of anxiety.
Considered as art,
Blues for Mister Charlie
runs aground for some
of the same reasons it stalls as propaganda. Baldwin might have done
something much better with the agitprop scheme of his play (noble,
handsome ' Negro student youth pitted against stupid, vicious town
whites), for to that in itself I have no objection. Some of the greatest
art comes out of moral simplification. But this play gets bogged down
in repetitions, incoherence, and in all sorts of loose ends of plot and
motive. For example: it is hard to believe that in a town beset by civil
rights agitation and with a race murder on its hands, the white liberal,
Parnell, could move so freely, with so little recrimination, from one com–
munity to another. Agan: it is not credible that Lyle, who is Parnell's
close friend, and his wife aren't bewildered and irate when Parnell
secures Lyle's arraignment on the charge of murder. Perhaps this remark-
