![]() ![]() If Baldwin was only fitfully successful, this does not detract from the quality of his best work one might even argue that Baldwin's so-called failures are equally instructive and, given his refusal to sanitize or streamline the unpleasant realities of American society, equally exemplary.įrom the beginning of his writing career, American literature's most famous former preacher would speak in terms of “vision” and “revelation.” In his first great essay, Everybody's Protest Novel ( 1949), Baldwin is already insisting that it is the “power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims.” The artist must provide vision, he states in The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy ( 1961), because “where there is no vision the people perish.” And in his essay “The Creative Process” ( 1962), he writes: “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, make freedom real.” Baldwin's primary theme as novelist, playwright, and essayist is the redemptive power of love. Baldwin's way forward, his own literary project of reconciling the social with the artistic, was indeed arduous. The key words here are “all but,” a phrase that allows for a narrow passageway, an elusive but not wholly inaccessible path that may be likened to a spiritual journey. ![]() ![]() ![]() In a 1959 review of a Langston Hughes collection, Baldwin concluded that Hughes was “not the first American Negro to find the war between his social and artistic responsibilities all but irreconcilable,” and here, too, Baldwin could have been speaking of his own struggle. What Baldwin wrote in his essay, Alas, Poor Richard ( 1961), published after the death of Richard Wright, could be said of himself: “The fact that worked during a bewildering and demoralizing era in Western history makes a proper assessment of his work more difficult.” Years after his death, opinion is still divided over the merits of Baldwin's fiction and even his later essays. His reputation sagged, not least among black radicals who considered Baldwin to have been co-opted by the (white) literary establishment. For many, though, Baldwin's early promise as a novelist was never fully realized according to this not entirely unsound perspective, the tumult of the 1960s took a heavy toll on the writer and rendered his fiction didactic and disheveled. Baldwin certainly demanded of himself this double purpose, and when the two are in accord-often in his essays, occasionally in his fiction-it is easy to see his work as among the most important in twentieth-century American literature. While he insisted that the writer's primary responsibility is to his or her craft, he was equally adamant that the writer has an obligation to serve as witness for society in doing so, the writer plays an essential role in the construction of a better future. For Baldwin, the life of an artist was a higher vocation, and he plunged into that life with inexhaustible, at times desperate, fervor. As a teenager James Baldwin abandoned the pulpit after a year and a half, but it would be fair to say that he always remained a preacher. ![]()
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