Early Novels and Stories Collected Essays

...All of the phrases and passages that I had found most memorable, the ones that had stuck in my mind over the years because they expressed so aptly and powerfully a thought that I knew in my mind and heart to be true all of those were from his essays...

...Don Wycliff is editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune...

...Many of them--the best of them-still do...

...And while he later left the church, he remained, at heart, a preacher...

...But always, whether in novel or essay, Baldwin was preaching a sermon...

...Without question, I believe, "The Fire Next Time" is Baldwin's greatest piece of writing...

...With Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, Roger Lundin seeks to locate the spiritual concerns underlying a life and art seldom marked by biographical or critical consensus...

...It shows him gullible and naive, as in his description of Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, during a visit by Baldwin to Muhammad's Chicago home in the early 1960s: "He teased the women, like a father, with no hint of that ugly and unctuous flirtatiousness I knew so well from other churches, and they responded like that, with great freedom and yet from a great and loving distance...

...If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him...

...Baldwin's experience was that of a black man trying to find meaning and success and identity in apartheid America...

...But Baldwin never gave up writing about the issue of race, which was (and is) to say, about the relationship in American society between black people and white people...

...Donoghue himself perhaps oversteps, however, when he argues that "Dickinson's Christianity was never a firm conviction...

...But it was his essays that stuck to my ribs...

...Obviously not...

...Best of all, he was a manifestly successful writer, a genuine stylist of the American language, and his success gave the lie to any who might be inclined to question the ability of a black man to write...

...It's different even from works that I have come to admire in my adulthood, like Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon...

...That's far different from the other fiction that I encountered at the same time and that became formative for me--works like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Albert Camus's The Fall, or almost any of Franqois Mauriac's novels...

...There are those writers, for example, who doubt that Dickinson's religious beliefs bear greatly on her poetry...

...I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about 'the man.' We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not...

...others assert that she rejected religion outright, while still others feel poetry itself "became her religion...

...Going back after thirty years and reading some of Baldwin's best-known works produced a surprise for me, however...

...Baldwin related to his father as he did in part because of the influence of white society on him and them...

...What all this says to me is that Baldwin was a brilliant essayist, and something less than a brilliant novelist...

...How embarrassing that must have been after the disclosure, by Malcolm X and others, of Muhammad's promiscuity and his taking advantage of his female disciples...

...Whether or not one agreed with what he was saying at any particular moment, his intelligence was luminous, too obvious to be questioned or doubted...

...None was from a novel or a short story...

...It shows him wise and insightful, as in his lengthy discussion of the moral and psychological struggle that white Americans had to wage within themselves in order to confront the imperative of black liberation...

...Being black--or Negro, in the vernacular of the time was a crucial fact of life...

...The critic Dennis Donoghue has aptly observed that "of her religious faith virtually anything may be said, with some show of evidence...

...Which is not to say that he was a negligible novelist...

...The joy that Dickinson took in faith at that early age gave way in young adulthood to doubt, which her poems later absorbed as ambiguity and contradiction...

...And while many of his observations seem dated, many still ring authentic and accurate...

...It must have something to recommend it to have won the endorsement of that club of old fuddy-duddies...

...Despite such (now) strangesounding locutions as "the Negro" and "the Negro problem," Baldwin's prose still has punch, has style, has eloquence...

...It shows him at his best and most eloquent, as in the passage above, and at his worst and most foolish ("If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving...

...I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness," she wrote to a friend, "as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior . . . . I feel I shall never be happy without I love Christ...

...It was what he knew about, and as he stated so very forcefully in that same introductory piece: "One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience...

...Ultimately, what "The Fire Next Time" shows is James Baldwin as preacher...

...It will always be hard for white Americans--and may be now for some African-Americans--to appreciate how overwhelming and oppressive to black people were white people and the structures of segregation they imposed in those preliberation days...

...Such happiness proved elusive...

...He couldn't have...

...In the introductory piece in "Notes of a Native Son," which Toni Morrison chose to open the volume of essays, Baldwin observed that, at age twentyfour, after two years of supporting himself by waiting on tables and writing book reviews "about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert," he gave up writing such reviews...

...As Lundin's efforts attest, little in the life provides conclusive answers (and, Commonweal 2 0 October 9, 1998...

...She may be represented as an agnostic, a heretic, a sceptic, a Christian...

...So, too, with regard to her spirituality...

...Ah, such rare, sweet moments of freedom...

...But whether brilliant or merely good, Baldwin's fiction, along with his essays, deserves the honor of inclusion in The Library of America...

...Her own words at the age of fifteen would seem to refute this...

...Yet, given the housebound poet's hymnal meters, her biblical references, clipped Calvinist idiom, and enduring preoccupation with God, Jesus, suffering, death, and (her "Flood subject") immortality, the question persists: To what extent did Dickinson espouse the Congregationalist faith of her family and of her community in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the middle nineteenth century...

...Where one lived, worked, traveled, socialized, was educated, sought entertainment, was treated for illness--all that and more-was determined by white society...

...He was a preacher's son who became, in his youth, a preacher...

...Baldwin ultimately came to appreciate the older man and some of the lessons he had tried to impart about living as a black man in a white society...

...Not to have included it would have been to devalue the entire enterprise, since Baldwin clearly was a very important American novelist...

...Don Wycliff i t would be impossible to overstate what James Baldwin meant to me as a young man, a black student in a predominantly white college, in the mid- to late 1960s...

...The matter resists illumination as thoroughly as any aspect of her famously tenebrous career...

...It was, quite literally, a totalitarian kind of oppression...

...Indeed, until I went back and reread Another Country and Go Tell It on the Mountain, I could not recall, except in the sketchiest way, the plot of either...

...So even when he wrote about other things--his strained relationship Commonweal | 9 October 9, 1998 with his father was a theme in many ess a y s - h e wrote about race: His father was the man that he was because he was a black man in a white society...

...It was for that reason that one particular passage resonated with me when I first read it thirty-some years ago in "The Fire Next Time," and resonates still: "Perhaps we were, all of us--pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children--bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run...

...if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love...

...In fact, it seems that where Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is concerned, no two critics can agree on much...

...STRAYING CLOSE TO HOME David Yezzi W hat were Emily Dickinson's religious beliefs...

...His prose projected a ferocious self-assurance that I could only wish I possessed...

...His subject was America's race problem ("the Negro problem") and his medium was the written word...

...Go Tell It on the Mountain was among the hundred best works of twentieth-century English-language fiction named recently by that Random House-Modern Library panel...