PARTISAN REVIEW
387
These writers have for the most part returned to traditional genres,
especially fiction; they are private persons rather than would-be
ideologues, and must grapple with an assortment of problems, both
human and technical, which were not central for Cleaver, Malcolm
or Fanon.
To say that these writers have begun to return, by the grand–
father principle, to the example of Baldwin, would be premature;
some have, but they are a various lot. All have been baptized in the
issues raised by the tension between Baldwin's work, still very vivid,
and Cleaver's or Malcolm X's; all are responsive to the increasing
predominance of black nationalist ideas among Negro intellectuals,
and to the general cultural ferment of the sixties, which in fiction has
opened the door to a diversity of technique and a freedom of ex–
pression unparalleled since the early modernist period. What these
writers share is a sense of historical and personal grievance, and a
willingness to take their blackness as the starting point of their
writing; there is no Eliotic escape into form. Chosen by circumstance
to bear privileged witness, they carry the mana of survival, the
honors and burdens of election, and exude the thrill of newly articu–
late speech. Toward whites they are invariably hostile or pitying,
not at the behest of ideology but as if released by
it,
reveling in a
long-suppressed passion of execration. But they show little impulse
to sentimentalize blacks, and they heap satirical venom on the life
style of the black middle class. They pay for their one-dimensional
anger, as Richard Wright did, by being unable to represent white
characters convincingly; they are cut off from the residual humanity
of the oppressor, from the whole shape of his malevolence, even his
very ordinariness.
Among older writers Baldwin was exceptional in his feel for the
reality of the other side - the important Baldwin, I mean, not the
recent hysterical one - and it is James Alan McPherson, the most
Baldwinesque of the newcomers, who is a partial exception in the
younger generation. His excellent book of stories,
Hue and
Cry
(1969), and Toni Morrison's novel,
The Bluest Eye
(1970), bring
to mind virtues that my account of Baldwin may have obscured. Rela–
tively conventional in form, straightforward in style, both McPherson
and Morrison are anatomists of the nuance and feel of personal re–
lationship. Their characters are children (or, grown-ups as vulnerable
