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MORRIS DICKSTEIN
came from Eldridge Cleaver in
Soul on I ce
and Calvin C. Hernton
in the first issue of
Amistad.
They are a good index to the sensibility
that, for better or worse, displaced him as a representative figure.
Significantly, both couple their attacks on Baldwin with extravagant
praise of Richard Wright. Cleaver's simpler charge, already men–
tioned, is that
his
work, especially as compared with Wright's, is
~'.v:oid
of a political, economic, or even a social reference." Paul
Goodman said something similar in his unfavorable review of
Another
Country.
This is much more true of the novels than the essays, and
least true of
Nobody Knows My Name
(1961), the more public
and journalistic collection, which once seemed a paler echo of
Notes of a Native Son
but now seems impressively direct and refer–
ential.
> "
It
might be noted in passing that Ralph Ellison is hardly vul–
nerable to Cleaver's charge, though
his
political views are undoubtedly
~ore
repugnant to Cleaver and Hernton than Baldwin's are. Though
Ellison shares some of the fifties mystique of identity and personality
-:- as evident in the "invisibility" theme of the novel, which par–
ticularly mars the prologue and the very tedious epilogue - he, him–
self, born in 1914, is almost as much a child of the thirties as Wright.
If
Invisible Man
begins in ripe Southern Gothic on the order
Qf~
say, Flannery O'Connor's
Wise Blood,
it matures unexpectedly
in- the Brotherhood sections into a first-rate political novel. Irving
Howe, in one of the few missteps in his commendable essay "Black
Boys and Native Sons," complains that this part of the book "does
not quite ring true." I find it a brilliant success, done with something
like a Dickensian freedom and accuracy of caricature. Howe stumbles,
I think, on Ellison's method. One can't of course "refute" the CP
by inventing a leader with a slippery glass eye - unless you are
Dickens, or Ellison, and are dealing with an organization that was
ev.idently more Kafkaesque than functional. In any case, Ellison's
refutation is more convincing than all the labored anti-Communist
polemics that run through Harold Cruse's idiosyncratic but indis–
pensable book
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.
The two books
together should be enough to convince anyone too young to re–
member that the Party was probably the worst thing that ever hap–
pened to American radicalism.
The crucial charge against Baldwin has little to do with
his
