Blacks, Whites and Grays:
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS and WRITING Blacks, Whites and Grays By Stanley Edgar Hyman The striking photograph that serves as the jacket design for Nobody Knows My Name (Dial, 241 pp., $4.50) reveals James...
...We have seen that lean and hungry black cat in Baldwin's landscape before, notably in the Harlem gutters in Go Tell It on the Mountain, but never realized that it was the author himself...
...No one can doubt Baldwin's enormous talent...
...the writer in the foreground of his scene, ambiguously observer and observed...
...Baldwin's vision of race relations in the United States also has its St...
...More than that, he must decide firmly who he is, and what he is, and stand there...
...In "A Fly in Buttermilk," an account of the only Negro boy at an "integrated" Southern high school, Baldwin displays the parents' motivation as ambition for the boy to get an adequate education rather than any kind of racial crusading...
...It comes from the defiant last stanzas of the greatest of all blues songs, Bessie Smith's "Young Woman's Blues...
...Problems of identity are just as tricky in the essays...
...It is flawed by "gratuitous and compulsive" violence, but "Wright's unrelentingly bleak landscape was not merely that of the Deep South, or of Chicago, but that of the world, of the human heart...
...His work was a road-block in my road," Baldwin writes, as Henry James called Maupassant a lion in his path...
...Baldwin also quotes blues lyrics by "Ma" Rainey and others...
...If the blues he uses for his title says "Nobody knows my name," there is also a blues beginning "My first name is James...
...the second, Giovanni's Room, symbolically accepted Negro identity in the guise of a white man accepting his repressed homosexuality...
...I'm as good as any woman in your town, I ain't no high yaller, I'm a deep yaller brown...
...There is nothing in Nobody Knows My Name as bold as the essay in Notes of a Native Son that is written with an ironic white "we," but observe the dance of pronouns in a lecture to a white audience about the Negro: "This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is, since both of us, black and white, got here...
...He writes: "I had never listened to Bessie Smith in America (in the same way that, for years, I would not touch watermelon), but in Europe she helped to reconcile me to being a -nigger.' " Her recording of "Backwater Blues" is used as a literary touchstone: a story by Richard Wright is "as spare and moving" as the song...
...The Southerner remembers," he writes, "historically and in his own psyche, a kind of Eden in which he loved black people and they loved him" (that is: historically before the Civil War...
...The essays divide into a first group, concerned with the Negro question, and a second group largely literary...
...Negroes want to be treated like men," Baldwin writes in desperate italics...
...Like the blues singer, Baldwin talks a great deal about himself in the book, but it is usually the artificial persona or mask of the blues...
...Baldwin writes of a crisis of identity earlier in his life: "I could not be certain whether I was really rich or really poor, really black or really white, really male or really female, really talented or a fraud, really strong or merely stubborn...
...This is true, and it clears the air of a certain amount of do-goodism, but it is only a part of the truth...
...In this sense the collection is less frank and personal than its predecessor, Notes of a Native Son, and only in the sections on Wright and Norman Mailer, ironically, does something of Baldwin himself appear...
...The blues pervade the book...
...Like the protagonist of Go Tell It on the Mountain, whose identifications ranged from St...
...He wears a T-shirt, and his face displays a look of infinite sadness, as though he bore all the suffering in the world on his slumped shoulders...
...with Ellison and Baldwin it became the major strain in American Negro writing...
...The combination had always been in the blues...
...many Negroes who buck the mobs are motivated partially, or even wholly, by "ideals" and "convictions...
...The new tradition was symbolist fantasy, and it came in from modern European literature, but a native symbolist poetry in the Negro folk tradition stood waiting to receive it—the blues...
...a passage by Jack Kerouac is in comparison "thin, like soup too long diluted...
...the return of the native son to Harlem...
...Baldwin can see only part of the truth because an "abnormally ambitious" young Negro, himself, keeps getting into the forefront of his scene...
...His remarks about American immigration and racial stereotypes show a considerable ignorance of history and anthropology...
...He shows little acquaintance with the great literature of the past, apart from the Bible, and he will quote Emerson or T. S. Eliot with an innocent "Someone said...
...psychologically before puberty...
...Primarily it involves a coming to terms with Richard Wright, the author Baldwin identifies as his spiritual father...
...But few whole essays do...
...Three of the book's 15 essays are memoirs of Wright, the last of them the only piece in the book previously unpublished...
...John the Divine to Mildred in Of Human Bondage, Baldwin's complex ambivalence will not let his personality come to rest anywhere...
...Any number of sentences and passages in this book carry absolute conviction...
...Baldwin continually projects himself onto the scene he is describing...
...Some people call me a hobo, some call me a bum, Nobody knows my name, nobody knows what I've done...
...Baldwin's prose falls frequently into cliche ("a match in the powder keg") or jargon ("the aforementioned coterie...
...that black man, sexless, hanging from a tree...
...Go Tell It on the Mountain showed us the sharpness and range of his perceptions, and Giovanni's Room their depth and emotional truth...
...As this confusion about his own literary tradition suggests, Baldwin is not educated enough (by education I do not mean schooling) for his intelligence, ambition and talent...
...In the title essay, Baldwin generalizes about "just what made Negro parents send their children out to face mobs": "Those Negro parents who spend their days trembling for their children and the rest of their time praying that their children have not been too badly damaged inside, are not doing this out of 'ideals' or 'convictions' or because they are in the grip of a perverse desire to send their children where they are not wanted.' They are doing it because they want the child to receive the education which will allow him to defeat, possibly escape, and not impossibly help one day abolish the stifling environment in which they see, daily, so many children perish...
...It is discouraging to note that the shapeliest and most eloquent essay in the book is the earliest, a fine review of André Gide's Madeleine that appeared in The New Leader in 1954...
...Black Boy is a very impressive book, but it was The Man Who Lived Underground, appearing in Cross-Section in 1944, along with the fiction of Ralph Ellison about the same time, that freed American Negro writing from the fetters of naturalism, and thus made Baldwin possible...
...Baldwin explains that when he suffered a kind of breakdown in Europe, two Bessie Smith records helped him to recover...
...I have always wondered," Baldwin told an interviewer in 1953, "why there has never, or almost never, appeared in fiction any of the joy of Louis Armstrong or the really bottomless, ironic and mocking sadness of Billie Holiday...
...The expression of this thwarted love, in Baldwin's obsessive imagery in the book, is lynching and castration: "hanging from a tree, while white men watched him and cut his sex from him with a knife...
...It strikes the perfect note for this collection of magazine articles written over the past seven years, and it raises all the issues: a composition in blacks, whites and grays...
...Baldwin dismisses Wright's novelette The Man Who Lived Underground, and says that the work that proved "an immense liberation and revelation" for him was Black Boy, "one of the major American autobiographies...
...I ain't gonna marry, ain't gonna settle down, I'm gonna drink good moonshine, and run these browns down...
...Yet there is no reason to doubt that, with characteristic ambivalence, Baldwin feels and always felt the love and respect for Wright that he claims, and his judgment of Wright's work is very perceptive...
...John elements and its Mildred elements...
...Baldwin mocks Wright in the memoirs, exposes his absurdity as a social thinker, cruelly notes the replacement of his friends by "dreary sycophants" in his last years, even identifies Wright's "real" impulse toward American Negroes: "to despise them...
...See that long lonesome road, don't you know it s gotta end...
...the sex torn from its socket and severed with a knife...
...The literary ones tend to be better, although the racial essays are often shrewd, tough-minded and eloquent...
...She sings: I'm a young woman, and ain't done runnin' round, I'm a young woman, and ain't done runnin' round...
...And I'm a good woman, and I can get plenty men...
...IF the book's racial message is ultimately simple, its literary message is more complicated...
...What Baldwin's Negro asks of white America, quite simply, is that it stop making him either a mammy or a eunuch, and recognize him as a man...
...He writes of his first meeting with Mailer in 1956: "I was then (and I have not changed much) a very tight, tense, lean, abnormally ambitious, abnormally intelligent, and hungry black cat...
...The subjects of Baldwin's novels have been notably masked and elusive...
...Sentences ramble or have no subject, and one whole essay, "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel: An Address," wanders ruinously from its topic...
...Baldwin's title, Nobody Knows My Name, is nowhere identified in the book...
...WRITERS and WRITING Blacks, Whites and Grays By Stanley Edgar Hyman The striking photograph that serves as the jacket design for Nobody Knows My Name (Dial, 241 pp., $4.50) reveals James Baldwin through a broken window, standing in what is apparently the foundation of a demolished house...
...Baldwin needs to read more literature and to work harder at its discipline, form...
...The first, Go Tell It on the Mountain, disguised its story of a boy's conversion to homosexuality as a religious conversion...
Vol. 44 • July 1961 • No. 29
