The Twin Urges of James Baldwin

...Hans Kiing has written a provocative and important contribution to that debate...

...But it does mean that the director can't allow personal feeling to cloud political issues...

...Clearly it is this sharing that Kiing is defining as the content of salvation...

...On Being a Christian has long been a best seller in Europe, and the English version is already engaging the interested attention of thousands of readers--not only, or not chiefly, among "the cultural despisers of religion" to whom volumes of apologetics have conventionally been addressed, but among Christians of various denominations who find it impossible to affirm a faith in the Christian tradition in toto but who cannot shake off the hold that the gospel of Jesus Christ has upon them...

...Mathieu is as sharply drawn as that in Rebellion in Patagonia, it doesn't turn history into a melodrama...

...Since Baldwin is too intelligent not to notice this, we get an uneasy compromise, between old habits and new possibilities...

...Thus, Henry Fonda's walk made him black, and Joan Crawford's resemblance to a woman in the local grocery store made her black, while Bette Davis' popping eyes made WILFRED SHEED, /ormer Literary Editor o] Commonweal, is author o/ several hovels, most recently, People Will Always Be Kind...

...But his second escape at times almost makes up for the first: which is simply to talk about movies according to their kind, with amusement, irony and his own quirky insights...

...It is hard to be accurate concerning the pace of my country's progress...

...For instance, in the dopey film, In the Heat o/ the Night, there is a scene where the white sheriff humbles himself to carry Sidney Poitier's bags, and Baldwin sees for a moment something "choked and moving" in this, only to round on it sternly as a dangerous daydream...

...For instance, in the latter film, he has a passage on a successful black son's relation to his father that probably no one else would have thought of...

...He discovers the theater and loses his religion almost at the same moment...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Your work, even your atheism, will always taste of religion...

...But since getting mad at the movies is only one step removed from getting mad at the funnies, he escapes periodically in two directions, one bad and one good...

...Canada Lee [in Native Son] was Bigger Thomas, but he was also Canada Lee: his physical presence, like the physical presence of Paul Robeson, gave me the right to live...

...It is evident throughout the chapters on Christ that Kiing, together with many contemporary theologians, is critical of the orthodox doctrine of Christ for having done less than full justice to the humanity of Jesus...

...So he became a man of the stage, dealing with real people and not their images...

...In the last pages he richly describes a church ceremony he went through as a boy, akin to attaining the last mansions of mysticism: and you have to do something after that...

...Taken as a whole, Kiing's attempt at such a portrait must, it seems to me, be counted a success...

...But the news I hear is different...

...The Devil Finds Work (Dial, $6.95) shows Baldwin groping-for it--not' just because he's a hustler, at least as writers go, but because he has a genuine quasireligious vocation...

...In his early days, the twin urges came together to make very good policy indeed...

...His new position is still very much in the works...

...He even talks several times of human weakness (as opposed to white weakness)--including his own: which suggests that the hanging judge may be ready to come down from his perch and mix it with us...

...The black enigma was transformed overnight into the black chatterbox...

...It tends to attribute history to a single personality much as Fascism would invest history in such a personality...

...But it isn't enough for the filmmaker just to be sympathetic to his left-wing heroes because of the perfidy and defeat they suffer...

...Acknowledging that historical-critical research can neither confirm faith nor destroy it, Kiing has had the courage to ask whether or not the understanding of the figure of Jesus that is left to us when such research has done its work is compatible with the sort of commitment to him that has defined the content of Christian discipleship...

...Bearing the subtitle "The Distinction," Kiing's presentation of who Jesus was (and is) and of what Jesus did (and does) avoids the conventional distinctions of dogmatic Christology, "the Christ image of the councils," and strives to do justice to the results of the critical study of the Gospels...

...There are those (and I am one of them) who will sniff "reductionism" is any such effort to find the kernel of the gospel inside the husk of the tradition, but it will not do to dismiss Kiing's book in so hasty a fashion, for it is animated by an explicit loyalty to the Christian and Catholic tradition and is ultimately concerned with the question of continuity in that tradition...

...Specifically lies about race...

...More writers should do this: we were raised as much in the movie house as the library, and it's pretentious to go on blaming it all on loyce...

...And he gives us the old castration folderol as if it were piping hot...

...His book has no pictures, which is unusual in a film book, but quite appropriate for this one...

...Henceforth in even the silliest play, the actors' presence would thrust reality through at Baldwin...

...It wastes no sentimentality on All and no bitterness on Mathieu...

...Presumably the purpose behind leftwing filmmaking is to raise political consciousness...

...Only to come out more religious than ever---only at random now, passionately foraging for Good and Evil in race, in movies, even in Norman Mailer...

...But for now he remains up there wagging his finger sternly at the converted and the bored...

...Young Blacks today seem more confident than Baldwin's prototypes but i~ might only take a few full-time bigots plus some ad hoc recruitsmas in South Boston-to chip the paint off this...

...BOOKS ON BEING HANS KUNG JAROSLAV PEIAKA~ On Be|raft a Chrtst~m HANS KUNG Doubleday, $12.95 During the winter of 1899/1900, Adolf yon Harnack, then the most eminent theological scholar of the time, delivered a series of public lectures at the University of Berlin on the theme "The Essence of Christianity...

...His own course was set...

...And although brotherhood epics like In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner were flailed insensible by white critics, leaving precious little to pick on, in each case he finds some scene or other even richer in phoniness, or closer to truth, than we suspected...

...In fact Baldwin's whole treatment of this story suggests a potential literary critic, if he'd calm down for a minute...

...Many whites now go for years without thinking about Blacks at all...

...He has been away a long time and I'm sure he has a story to tell about that, perhaps his 24 June 1977:406 best one yet...

...But one of the odd things that happened in the sixties was that the Blacks became largely de-mystified, for better or worse...

...It's a bleak picture and if Baldwin sees any lift in the clouds he either isn't telling or he rejects it as a dangerous illusion, an invitation to drop one's guard...

...Because the subject is movies, and most movies simply do not accommodate such religious passion...

...He is also good on The Defiant Ones and Lawrence of Arabia though here one senses that he is not saying all he knows...

...Blacks have been known to kill babies too, in Biafra and elsewhere, but nobody said they like it...

...But the sermon's subject must be at least in the same ball-park as the style, or you get bathos, the sermon that fails to rise...

...The result here is not Fascism, but it is a kind of compromising obsession with authority and leadership...

...The only way a film can avoid this political error is by having the courage of its own convictions---by really allowing a political analysis of history to dictate its content and feeling...

...In the original German and in translations into more than a dozen languages, the book that grew out of those lectures provoked a debate that is still going on about what is essential and what is accidental in the historic deposit of the Christian faith...

...And we were relieved to find they were not the brooding giants that Baldwin had conjured, but just average publicity hounds...

...If stage acting could transplant God, it utterly demolished screen acting for him...

...Kfing's loyalty to tradition and his quest of an "essence of Christianity" converge in the most important--and most moving--portion of his book, the discussion of Jesus Christ, which is the second of the four major divisions of On Being a Christian...

...When Baldwin holds back something it distorts his whole manner...

...He is not seeing those movies as an average black man, but as a unique exile, and the pose is beginning to wear thin...

...And as de /acto segregation continues to settle like mold, his future seems assured...

...The reality of stage actors playing Macbeth is enough to blow away even that encounter with the Holy Ghost...

...In other words, theirs was a political difference...

...But anyone who sees reality as clearly as Baldwin does must be tempted at times to run like the wind...

...And as if to symbolize this, he literally tiptoes out of church one Sunday and heads downtown for a show: taking, as he says in another context, his church with him...

...hen James Baldwin goes wrong he has taken to doing lately), it usually seems less a failure of talent than of policy...

...Though its conflict between All la Pointe and Col...

...The invisible man has returned...

...Living his life on several borderlines, he has learned to watch his step: driven at the same time by an urge to please and a mission to scold...

...But his personal witness, his strength, has begun to sound tentative...

...If you're raised an incarnational Christian (and it's hard to imagine another kind), flesh and blood can be food and drink to you...

...After all, that's what movies are for---even for those preachers who denounce them the loudest...

...While for the former, he provides such a droll plot summary that the absurdity jumps a dimension...

...If by chance he has not seen the others, m particular Death Wish, the mugger-killing wet dream, he has wandered unarmed into the one subject Americans really know about...

...Perhaps, then, not the ideal man to write about movies...

...Reversing the fateful separation of theology and ethics, Kting uses an analysis of cconomics or of sexuality as a means of opening up the meaning of fulfillment and thus Commonweal: 407...

...Throughout, his eyes swarm greedily over the screen, scavenging for small truths...

...His apologetic intention is to identify the search for authentic humanity, as expressed in the social and political struggles of the present day, with the concrete representation of authentic humanity that is given in the life and teachings, the sufferings and death, the resurrection and presence, of Jesus of Nazareth...

...And here we have a fight to expect the latest news from Baldwin and not a rehash...

...Unfortunately the childhood section is tantalizingly short, and the adult's voice horns in too often, but some fine things come through: in particular the way the young Baldwin had to convert certain white actors into blacks, even as white basketball fans reverse the process ~oday, in order to identify...

...And this is the first problem we come across in the new book...

...The problem now is not so much fear as deepening indifference...

...The magic element which is their particular genius is precisely what maddens his fundamentalist soul the most...

...This section ends with a valuable addition to Baldwin's early autobiography: a corpus to which one had thought no further additions were possible...

...With a recognition of all of its ambiguities, Kiing feels able to reaffirm the commitment and to do so with eloquence...

...His white men sound at times exactly like Susan Brownmiller's rapists, whom that author also transformed into Everyman, and in fact like all the hyperaggressive bullies you've ever met: and these surely come in all colors...

...And this, just as much as his comptab sion to preach when there's nothing to preach about, diverts him from his real lover, truth...

...White liberals craved a spanking and they got a good one...

...Why else would we be interested in something that happened in remote Patagonia fifty years ago, if not for the insight it provides into political relations everywhere...

...Although he seems to know something about the craft of movies, it doesn't interest or charm him in the least...

...As an alternative to Rebellion in Patagonia, with its romantic left-wing heroes and inscrutable fight-wing villain, I still prefer The Battle ol Algiers...

...For the moment, revolutionary rant seems as remote as the evangelism that used to pacify Blacks: but again, Baldwin isn't quite calling for it, only toying with it...

...A prophet should disturb all levels of opinion and must therefore be something of a precisionist...

...Ponte-Corvo felt no need to exaggerate either personality, for the sufficient difference between them, the only one that mattered to him, was that Mathieu had the wrong analysis of history while Ali's was proved right...

...Like Pascal at the real theater, he sees nothing but lies up there...

...Baldwin's weakness as a prophet is to suppose that the rest of us experience life as intensely as he does...

...So, the tension remains...

...White Americans have been encouraged to keep on dreaming, and black Americans have been alerted to the necessity of waking up...

...And the attempt is worthwhile if only for the sake of some sprighltly lines, to wit, "J...

...If his overall sociology is suspect right now, his ability to enlarge a small emotion so that we can all see it is not...

...And with so many clergymen, he too often deduces Reality solely by intelligence in this boo~, and while he has more than enough of that quality, it tends to fly off in bootless directions unless anchored by touch...

...Rebellion in Patagonia is so far gone, however, that in it the historical crisis is only, like religious conversion, a change in attitude on the part of one individual...

...Of all our writers he is one of the most calculating...

...Indeed, this is the crucial difference between the few left-wing films that are true to their own politics and the many that are misdirected (pun intended...

...It doesn't follow that a genuinely left-wing film has to be cold, for Battleship Potemkin, which succeeds in making an aesthetic myth out of Marxism itself, certainly isn't cold...

...He regards the language about "natures" and "properties" as too static a category for the description of what I share with Jesus as a human being...

...He was not at the mercy of my imagination as he would have been, on the screen: he was on the stage, in flesh and blood, and I was, therefore, at the mercy of his imagination...

...He is right to love the stage...

...Embodied reality, thick, hot and tangible is Commonweal: 405 Baldwin's grail, even jerking him loose from his own rhetoric...

...What one can question, by the current division of racist labor, is his account of the white psyche...

...His art needs real bodies...

...On the Black side of the fence, one simply has to take him on trust...

...This is vintage Baldwin: and if he lacks confidence in his softer notes he shouldn't (his sentimental notes are another matter...

...Because of this comical misunderstanding, many whites ceased being impressed by Blacks altogether, except such as carried knives, and a new psychic alignment occurred that Baldwin should come home and tell us about...

...But in a truly politicized film--in The Battle ot Algiers, or Lucia --this conversion is at least understood to have occurred in the course of events, in history, rather than in the personality of some individual...

...For instance in checking A Tale of Two Cities against what he has learned in the streets he perhaps inadvertently suggests to this reader at least how Dickens might have veered away from what he had learned in the streets...

...He talks of being terrorized in some Southern town, but he can't remember what year or, apparently, the distinction between one town and another...

...A catalog of the pictures of Christ put forward by philosophers, poets, and novelists provides an effective foil for the attempt to draw a portrait that is not simply a projection of one's own fantasies or aspirations...

...If that is the only response the filmmaker has to history, the result is mere humanitarianism and his political purpose in making the film is inadequately served...

...and his strength is roughly the same...

...Because here again he simply says nothing that a contemporary reader can use...

...By accepting such drugstore rebels as Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael at their own valuation, we let ourselves in for one of the greatest letdowns in memory...

...Since no improvement is to be trusted, the implicit solution is revolution, and Baldwin talks airily of seizing property as if this were still the slaphappy sixties when all seemed possible...

...The attempt to seduce is too slick...

...Because even the stills would be lies...

...her not only black but practically Jimmy himself...

...So his tone sounds false...

...Nobody ever saw these movies quite the way he did, or ever will...

...Paul de Vence...

...Earlier I likened the way left-wing filmmaking deals with revolutionary struggle to the way conversion literature deals with the conversion, by omission...

...I assume he is still a Black spokesman in good standing...

...People apt to be reading Baldwin at all have long since graduated from this level of rant...

...He talks for instance of whites being terrified of Blacks, and Blacks being enraged by whites, as if this blanketed the case...

...He may or may not feel that strongly about movies (it's hard to believe), but sincerity isn't the issue...

...Baldwin still writes as though our souls were so hag-ridden by race that even our innocent entertainments reflect it...

...He talks at one point of the seismographic shudder Americans experience at the word homosexual, but he handles it pretty much like a hot potato himself: talking around and around it without quite landing on it...

...Very hard from St...

...It is hard to believe that in Paris and lstanbul his mind was really on American movies: but they might have been something in the attic that he wanted to get rid of...

...Edgar Hoover, history's most highly paid (and most utterly" useless) voyeur," and random bangs and flashes...

...He does not automaticaUy have to lecture us on every topic he writes about...

...Anyhow for Baldwin there is still just something called the South, unchanging and indivisible, and the liberals down there might as well pack up shop...

...Meanwhile off-screen, geographical distance may have obscured some of the social nuances Baldwin usually pounces on so swiftly and surely...

...And now the times seems to call for something a little different...

...conversely, only the greatest of actors could insert physicality into a movie, and that fleetingly...

...We can get fresher testimony than that every day of the week...

...But this stuff passes harmlessly overhead...

...A film that is pitiless, but also clear-minded and politically "correct" in its interpretation of history, is far more likely to be effective...

...Although his book is disarmingly datelined from France, which is nearer the pied-noir country, there must be a victims' network of information which keeps him up to date...

...and perhaps, for just a little while, he's done that...

...The bad one is to change the subject outrageously in order to raise the emotional ante: thus there are several references to how white people like to burn babies that totally stumped me...

...He may write for the masses, but he is read by the intelligentsia...

...In this more urbane mode, his racial intrusions often make good sense...

...A preacher doesn't have to feel what he says every Sunday: rhetoric is an art, and Baldwin practices it very professionally...

...So paranoia as before is his message to Blacks, and a white reviewer is in no position to question it...

...Although, as Claude Brown once said privately these men could not have rounded up ten followers in Harlem, they told us they were leaders, so we took them for leaders...

...In Baldwin's case a movie case-history is doubly valuable because his angle is so solitar),, shaped by no gang and deflected by no interpretation, and shared only with a white woman teacher, herself a solitary...

...Of such movies as Death Wish or Straw Dogs or the worst of Clint Eastwood (if such there be) or black exploitation films--in short all the movies that validate bullying on one side or another and make it chic--he says nothing except, tantalizingly, of the latter that they "make black experience irrelevant and obsolete" (his own, or everyone's...

...But then too many amateurs joined in the fun, all the Raps and Stokelys and Seales, until even !iberal guilt gave out...

...Again this is policy (the word homosexual does go off like a fire alarm, reminding us to put up our dukes) but in this case, I think, too much policy...

...And this perhaps rescues him even as a writer about movies...

...The folks pays him to preach (to use his own self-mocking language), so he turns it on mechanically, almost absent-mindedly, lapsing at times into incoherence, as if he's 24 June 1977:404 fallen asleep at the microphone...

...and he wrote some of his best work for i t - - including my own favorite Amen Corner in which he uses the stage to exorcise the Church once and for all...