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characters obs'erves, "I've got no vision of emancipating anybody. I want
to emancipate myself."
In
what might be regarded as an attempt to preserve his own sens'e
of himself, a sense which he had struggled so long to achieve, he began
to withdraw from his own writing: as it became more public, less of him
seemed to be in it. As his notoriety increased, his personality was over–
simplified, appropriated, and consumed. By obviously gauging (but often
misjudging) his effects, Mr. Baldwin created a situation in which th'e
eye of the audi'ence was fixed on the author as a performer, and the
urgency of the race problem in America b'ecame a backdrop for elaborate
rhetorical assaults which could be dutifully acknowledged but forgotten
with a sigh. Perceived as a performance, his writing was relatively pain–
less, and the n'ecessity behind it seemed less threatening when it could
be
confused with the audience's own imaginative needs.
While in his essays Mr. Baldwin might continue to narrow and
fragment himself in order to conform to his particular rhetorical inten–
tions, successful fiction demands a certain imaginative wholeness which
he has rarely been able to achieve. For all its faults and crudities,
Go Tell
It On The Mountain
still stands as his most successful work in fiction.
A sustained effort to wrest words from live experienc'e, it was liable to
the excesses which such barehanded grappling must involve. But what
authority the novel has exists apart from its technique: it is to be found
in the underlying force of the author's relentless exploration and discovery
of his own feelings.
The stories in this new collection add nothing to Mr. Baldwin's
stature, nor do they diminish it by much. Five have appeared in print
before; the other three are new and, for the most part, disappointing.
Taken as a whole, the book traces the author's progress from "The Rock–
pile" and "The Outing," halting first steps toward the first novel, to his
most recent work, which suffers from its journalistic conception. With
the possible exception of the first two, all the stories tend to tear th'em–
selves apart. At best, they are composed in a prose oddly balanced
be–
twe'en sheer banality and rhetoric as thick as jam. (It is no accident
that both extremes are basically evasive, generalized ways of packaging
experience which do not require careful thought or close fidelity to the
particulars at hand.) The balance is so precarious, the pull in either
direction so great, that one false step is fatal.
The author, unhappily, makes more than one. While his writing
labors under a burden of irrelevant subtlety, his perceptions lack bite.
Too often in these stories Mr. Baldwin is held spellbound by his sensi–
tivity; it is like a wall between him and his characters.
If
he fails to make
the verbal incisions necessary to expose his subjects, it is often because he
