PARTISAN REVIEW
383
far more than his novels do, which helps account for their superiority.
Baldwin's problem as a novelist is not simply his difficulty in fully
imagining other people or his inability to take the form in hand,
as Ellison did, and mold
it
to his own vision. It has been Baldwin's
misfortune to move from one false notion of the novel- the New
-Critical notion of a highly crafted, distanced object - to the exact
opposite fallacy, by which an aimless assortment 'of characters serves
as threadbare masks for a purely personal set of obsessions and
intensities. (These impressions are bolstered by
A Rap on Race,
a
book of Baldwin's conversations with Margaret Mead, a typical pub–
lisher's brainchild. )
By all accounts Baldwin's life has been much entwined with
white people and white books; he deeply resisted having
his
con;.
sciousness raised in the direction of separatism.
The Fire Next Time
summarizes his ambivalence even as it burns with the intensity of
his anger. Now he is nowhere, an expatriate again,
all
anger - though
the lengthening chain of corpses from Malcolm X to George Jackson
does much to make his feelings plausible. It is ironic that the man
who is partly responsible for the current black mood, or at least
prophetic of it, should also fall victim ·to
it.
Baldwin's later
essays
become very harsh, and powerfully anticipate the antiintegrationist
militance that developed in the mid-sixties. "Do I really
want
to
be
integrated into a burning house?" he asked in
The Fire Next Time.
Earlier, in 1961, he summed up his message by saying that "to
be
a
Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in a
rage all the time." But for Baldwin that rage was a torment and an
ariguish; he quickly added that "the first problem is how to control
th~t
rage so it won't destroy you." For the angry young blacks of
the sixties, who perhaps avoided the worst scars that Baldwin and
Wright received so early, rage is their pride and power, not a poison
at the wellspring. Thus the paradox that while Baldwin has rehashed
and flattened what was once a richly complicated, ironic view of
the race problem in America, partly out of a 'desperate attempt to
keep abreast of the new mood, younger black writers regularly de–
fine their own positions by attacking him, much as he once attacked
Richard Wright.
Two of the most severe and damaging assaults, both by writers
not simply envious of his fame but deeply involved with
his
work,
