Vol. 38 No. 4 1971 - page 381

PA~TISAN
REVI ,EW ,
381
But it was the social dimension, which Dreiser and other Ameri–
can realists sg.ared, that dropped out of serious American fiction to–
ward the end of the forties. "Social affairs," Baldwin announced in the
preface to his first book of essays,
Notes of a Native Son (1955),
"are not generally speaking the writer's prime concern, whether they
ought to be or not." Baldwin's novels illustrate his conviction
all
too painfully.
As
Eldridge Cleaver said of
Another Country,
"his
characters all seem to be fucking and sucking in a vacuum." On the
other hand that same preface is titled "Autobiographical Notes," and
we ought not to underestimate the boldness and healthy egotism of
Baldwin's thrusting his private case forward as significant public
example. Baldwin had before him, as he later acknowledged, the
precedent of
Black Boy,
but there was little else to encourage
him
to
break the then prevalent mold of the impersonal artist who peers
at the public through the coy mask of his "works" - a mold to
which he generally adhered in his novels, as did Mailer. Later the
precedent of Baldwin himself would make Mailer's own break–
through more thinkable.
Advertisements for Myself,
with most of its
rich, bloody life in the italics of its autobiographical transitions, ap–
peared four yearS after
Notes of a Native Son.
And
The Armies of
the Night
is quite deliberately Mailer's
Fire Next Time,
the essay
that would explode into a book, the journalistic occasion that would
transform itself into a crucial act of self-definition (and, not by
chance, a national sensation).
But where Baldwin and even Mailer (despite his fascination
with power) must
reach out
to their public subjects (the Black
Muslims, the Pentagon march), then only to make that distance and
ambivalence their true subject, Wright's
Black Boy,
though more
purely autobiographical, sits in effortless mastery over
its
social theme,
the condition of the black man in the South. Yet Wright's book is
also more convincingly personal, in delineating his own special misery,
his
dawning self-recognition and final escape north. Neither J3aldwin
nor Mailer, immense egos both, have as yet written true autobiog–
raphies; their revelations are obsessive but selective. Genuine sons
of the forties and fifties, they remain essentially private persons
despite their fame. Wright, however, a disaffected son of the thirties,
did write an autobiography at age thirty-seven, but honed and sorted
his memories into a coherent fable, aiming, like all great autobiogra-
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