138
STEPHEN DONADIO
takes for granted precisely those things which should be in question,
e.g., the dimensions of his characters, the implications of their actions.
In "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon," for instance, his senti–
mentality about the European "sense of tragedy" is personified
in
Vidal,
a French film director: unexamined, his behavior is almost indistinguish–
able from the civility of moral exhaustion.
Most of the stories are too long and at the same time too schematic.
Given the author's procedure, this effect seems inescapable: Mr. Baldwin
frequently restricts himself to a preconceived scenario which he tediously
fills out, discovering nothing unexpected
in
the process. The characters,
much of the time, are only there to prove a point. The title story, for
example, deals with a red-necked southern sheriff's deputy who cannot
perform in bed with his wife until he slips into reverie about lynchings
and whupping blacks. In the hands of a comedian like Lenny Bruce, this
kind of sick joke might be reduced to one line--"Quick, Margaret, my
cattle prod!"
The stories which ring truest are "Come Out The Wilderness" and
"Sonny's Blues." In the first, a Negro secretary is about to be discarded
by her white lover (a painter she has evidently been supporting) and
she cannot bring herself to recognize the break; the second is concerned
with a Negro schoolteacher whose need for absolute security will not
allow
him
to face his troubled younger brother like a man. Both stories
deal with people forced to look at what they do not want to see;
in
both
the dialogue is clean and accurate, conveying a wide range of instinctive
and studied feelings. Here the author permits himself that freedom of
respons'e too often lacking in his work; in searching out his characters,
he shares in their equivocations of identity, ambivalence, and fear, con–
vincing the reader at last that he is saved, when he is saved, from his
own rhetoric by an unkillable awareness of the cost of vision.
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Stephen Donadio
PARTISAN REVIEW-Vols.
1-31
1934-1964
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