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politics, or his literary craftsmanship or even, for that matter,
his
precise position on the race question. The argument is that Baldwin's
homosexuality, his unconfident masculinity, is the hidden root of
all
his
writing and completely disqualifies him as representative spokes–
man. Cleaver and Hernton speak for an aggressive new generation,
bursting with phallic pride and masculine assertiveness, contemptuous
of fags (and women?), certain of its identity however much that
may threaten the white world. But white America loves Baldwin
because he is spineless and effeminate and "does not symbolize the
historic fear of the great, black phallus which lurks to rape and
pillage," while Wright "was perceived as a powerful, black phallus,
threatening their guilt-ridden, lily-white world (Hernton)." "Bald–
win's essay on Richard Wright reveals that he despised - not
Richard Wright, but his masculinity. He cannot confront the stud
in others - except that he must either submit to it or destroy it. And
he was not about to bow to a
black
man (Cleaver)."
These charges are malicious and exaggerated but they hit home,
and reveal the defects of Baldwin's strengths, the
mauvaise foi
near
the heart of his abstract eloquence. Baldwin's great theme, after
all,
is not the physical or social oppression involved in being black, but
the psychological burden. He told how he, a black man, had been
taught insidiously to internalize the white man's view of himself, to
hate his own skin and people, and hence to feel precarious, uprooted,
in his identity and masculinity. He wrote of the powerlessness of
black fathers in the face of The Man, and of his own confused
search for father and model. How unbearably poignant, then, that
he, the black man, so cruelly undermined, should remain the mythical
phallus, the object of the deepest sexual fantasies and expectations
of white people. But in presenting himself as a representative figure,
almost a generalized historical consciousness, he failed to deal can–
didly with his own homosexuality.
There is indeed a distinct but masked sexual animus in Bald–
win's early essays, especially in the essays on Wright, where Baldwin
repeatedly describes Bigger Thomas as "a monster created by the
American republic," a ghetto rat, a doomed figure of pity and
terror. This account, echoed by other critics, is false to the tone and
substance of the book. Wright portrays Bigger as a kind of symbolic
time bomb that goes off, and finally something of an existential hero,
