Eloquence and Smokescreens

...It contains some good writing and some bad—the latter, unhappily, predominating by a large margin...

...Almost everything about this story rings false...

...The setting is the annual Fourth of July picnic of the Mount of Olives Pentecostal Assembly which, on this occasion, involves a boat trip up the Hudson to Bear Mountain...

...Even the grotesque requires a firmer base in the real world...

...Style then becomes a smoke­screen—what we mean by "mere" rhetoric—behind which the human substance of the fable remains an unrealized assertion on the part of the author...

...The two best stories in this new volume— "The Outing," first published in New Story some 14 years ago, and "Sonny's Blues," which appeared in Partisan Review in 1957—derive their power from material of this sort...

...And not only a pleasure: It is precisely at such syntactical altitudes that one ex­ periences the full measure of this writer's involvement with his subject...

...As soon as Johnnie's personal crisis comes into focus, the fine detail that has been lavished elsewhere in the story becomes secondary—indeed, no longer seems part of the same tale—and Baldwin writes as if he were fighting for his life in tracing the course of that crisis as truthfully as he can...

...It is there, in that region of the mind where one's moral defaults to family feeling can neither be appeased nor transcended, that Baldwin really strikes fire...

...Yet the crux of the story has very little to do with all this finely rendered detail: The object of scrutiny here is not the picnic itself, but the emotions of the deacon's adolescent son, Johnnie, his uncertain relations with his younger brother (who is his father's favorite), his outright hatred and contempt for the father himself, and the emotional solace he seeks—and is uneasy of losing—in his passionate attachment to his friend David...

...The reader feels the pressure of this eloquence importuning his sensibilities, disarming—and intending to disarm— whatever ratiocinative response the actual human situa­tion of the tale calls for...

...But there, at least, the disparate materials are joined with a willed intensity that is not without power...

...But eloquence of this order remains an uncertain blessing for the writer of fiction...

...One's overriding impression is of an eloquent and resourceful writer indulging his own facility...

...There is some­thing about Paris which brings out the worst in Bald­win's fictional manner: It becomes, not a believable place but a moral fantasy—and quite a different world from the Paris depicted in his essays...

...In the more recent stories this willful intensity plays a larger and larger role, and the results are proportionately diminished...

...The writer is condemned to a narrow vein of memory and direct observation—precisely the vein from which Baldwin derives so much strength in his essays...

...What has haunted this man all his adult life—so we are asked to believe—is the memory of a lynching in his childhood, witnessed on the shoulders of his own father and punctuated by the bloody castration of the victim's immense sexual organs (" huge, huge, much bigger than his father's the largest thing he had ever seen till then, and the blackest...

...In relation to what precedes it—the whole miasma of guilt and accusation and counter-guilt—it has, at best, only the most sentimental connection, for if we respond to the emotions evoked in the main body of the story, we can scarcely credit those which are so obviously solicited in the final scene...

...The temptation is always to make it carry a heavier burden than it can justifiably support...

...WRITERS & WRITING Eloquence and Smokescreens By Hilton Kramer To a Reputation already overdrawn James Bald­win's new book adds little luster...

...It purports to give us an intimate glimpse into this man's inner conscious­ness, and what we discover there is, alas, a rampant case of sexual envy...

...It is this temptation—and this is not the only one—to which Baldwin has repeatedly succumbed in his novels, which all but destroyed his last play, Blues for Mr...

...He is thus at his best in these stories when dealing either with adolescence—the period when such guilt reveals itself most nakedly, and with the fewest de­fenses—or with adult relationships which remain locked in the grip of unresolved adolescent attach­ments...

...Going to Meet the Man (Dial, 249 pp., $4.95) is a volume of short stories, Baldwin's first...

...Going to Meet the Man" is about a white Southerner, a deputy sheriff currently involved in beat­ing up Negro civil rights workers...

...In "The Outing," we are back in the world of Bald­win's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain—the world of Negro piety and ghetto family life in Harlem...

...The mo­ments of truth in these stories (as in his novels) are all circumscribed within the perimeter of these tortured familial emotions...

...But this scene, fine as it is in itself, is almost another story...

...But to readers of his fiction it is becoming something of an obstacle—and I say this as a reader with a taste, if not indeed a weakness, for high style...

...Still worse is the story which gives this collection its title...

...even carica­ture requires a certain shading...

...A similar split makes itself felt in "Sonny's Blues...

...FOR ALL their flaws, though, "The Outing" and "Sonny's Blues" are as masterpieces compared to Baldwin's more recent efforts...

...It is a book which leaves the question of the author's problematic relation to the fictional medium unresolved...

...As a writer of fiction Baldwin lacks any notable powers of invention...

...The longest story in Going to Meet ilie Man is "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon.' It concerns an American Negro songwriter and film star, now an international celebrity, who, with his white Swedish wife and son, is preparing to return to America after 12 years in Paris...

...Not Faulkner but Tennessee Williams is the proper comparison here, and the story does indeed seem to be the first in which all the worst traits of Baldwin's plays—especially that indulgence of reverse stereotypes which is both a moral and a literary calamity—have been imported, wholesale, into his fiction...

...This is not in itself a fatal disability for a novelist or short story writer, but it does impose some stringent limits...

...In his essays this eloquence, being at once hortatory and confessional, is an undeniable source of strength, and Baldwin has employed it brilliantly, especially in those pieces where it functions to elevate criticism, auto­ biography, and inspired reportage into an exalted genre all his own...

...It is a sad turn for so fine a talent to take, and one hopes it does not mark a permanent direction...

...Baldwin's mastery of a certain kind of sentence—long, airy, and rhetorical, with sudden flights of feeling and quick repeats, which seize upon and dramatically distend a key emotion that seemed, on first appearance, about to be passed over and lost— is still a rare literary pleasure...

...In any case, here again only the flash-back recollections of family life in the United States, plus some banter between the hero and his sister, are at all credible...

...Among the elements which constitute this facility,Baldwin's extraordinary verbal eloquence is, in some respects, the most difficult to come to terms with...

...But these stories traffic in other materials as well, and in "Sonny's Blues" especially, one can see how this deflected attention almost swamps the story with a variety of facile emotions which have no necessary relation to the principal issue...

...Baldwin is far too gifted a writer to be counted out in any genre, but his handling of fictional materials in these stories does not induce any optimism...

...Here too the overriding theme is family guilt...

...Perhaps a Faulkner could have redeemed this crude story from the realm of fantasy and paranoia where Baldwin has left it—but I doubt it...

...In this case, it involves the feelings of the narrator—a school­teacher living in a Harlem housing project with his wife and kids, and a man who has bent his whole will to escaping the "funky'J world of the abyss which has threatened to engulf him since childhood—to­ward his younger brother, a jazz musician lately ar­rested on a narcotics charge and thus the very em­bodiment of a feared and hated fate...

...Both these conflicts are implicated in the guilty relations of these two brothers, but it is the articulation of the guilt it­self that is dramatically preeminent...

...Charlie, and which is one of the principal disabling features of the stories he has now collected in Going to Meet the Man...

...Baldwin brings an extraordinary empathy to bear on nuances of personality and emotion, physi­cal detail and turns of speech: The journey, the re­ligious service on the boat, and the events thereafter form a skillfully constructed tableau...

...Baldwin is a connoisseur of the subtle and inescapable guilts they induce, and of the corrosive, life-denying effects of these guilts on the whole emotional economy of human affairs...

...In his fiction, however, this vein narrows still further, and comes to rest most securely on a single point of concentration: Only in its dealing with family relationships—with the relation of brother to brother, and brother to sister, and of children to parents (especially of sons to fathers) —does Baldwin's fiction really come alive...

...The elaborate architecture of his most elegant rhetoric seems to isolate, and enclose, those emotions which elude him at more workaday levels of discourse...

...Their style, however, is not the only problem posed by these stories: The human substance itself is often oddly out of focus...

...The story closes, however, on a beautifully written scene in which the younger brother, while the narrator looks on, performs with great success with a jazz combo—his artistry and his fate redeemed...

...Two separate conflicts are joined in this harrowing tale with great skill: the intolerant feelings of hard-won respectability toward anything having to do with disreputable "good­time people," and the fear of the Philistine in the face of any sort of moral or esthetic uncertainty...

...At the moment the deed is done, the dying man's eyes look straight into the child's—to what momentous effect we see straightaway when the protagonist, now a grown man, weary of his unsavory duties in the jailhouse and fearful that his sexual powers are waning, forces himself on his wife with the cry: "Come on, sugar, I'm going to do you like a nigger, just like a nigger, come on, sugar, and love me just like you'd love a nigger...