Horseman of the Apocalypse

...because [whites] cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country...

...When the country's most powerful newspapers lend themselves to irresponsible exaggeration about the number of Panthers shot by the police, as Edward J. Epstein demonstrated in the New Yorker, one marvels at how Baldwin can, in all earnestness, declare: "Now, exactly like the Germans at the time of the Third Reich, though innocent men are being harassed, jailed, and murdered, in all the Northern cities, the citizens know nothing, and wish to know nothing, of what is happening around them...

...With similar indifference to the facts, he speaks of the liberals' "crucifixion" of Alger Hiss, conveniently forgetting that Hiss crucified himself...

...A boyhood companion, still in Harlem, read the item in Lyons' syndicated newspaper column and called Baldwin to ask for the suit.-they had always been the same size...

...Again and again, I wondered whom besides himself Baldwin is addressing here, and to what purpose...

...In this sentimental anecdote, Baldwin reveals his need both to emphasize and half-apologize for the success that separated the two men, yet the self-impeachment rings false...

...But this would be forgivable-god knows his success took an extraordinary kind of talent and persistence in the face of appalling odds-If it did not contradict and dishonor so many of his angry declarations...

...Yet even in the relatively brief period between the writing and the publication of these pages, much of what Baldwin says about the Panthers has become obsolete...

...And when Baldwin labels America "the Fourth Reich," the irresponsibility he hurls at the liberals applies equally to himself, for he is jettisoning all the vital historical, moral and political distinctions that in the long run are just as indispensable to the nation's blacks as to its whites...

...Eldridge Cleaver-whom Baldwin forgives with astonishing charity for savagely raking him over the coals in Soul on Ice-lives abroad, an embittered sectarian...

...Writers &Writing HORSEMAN OF THE APOCALYPSE BY PEARL K. BELL It has been almost 10 years since James Baldwin flung down the gauntlet before America with his intemperate, agonized and chilling prophecy of the nation's future if we refused to confront our severe racial problems in a radically new way...

...Unlike The Fire Next Time, with its ominous but consistently sane rumble of warning, Baldwin's new book becomes stuck repeatedly on a single evangelical note of denunciatory threat, so that one's instinctive response is more defensive than sympathetic...

...there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white...

...And does Baldwin mean to finger his many white friends, like William Styron, when he writes: "White America remains unable to believe that black America's grievances are real...

...Now, in No Name in the Street (Dial, 197 pp., $5.95)-the title comes from that bleakest and most intransigent record of suffering in the Old Testament, the Book of Job-Baldwin's rage and despondency about racist America have taken a highly disputable and far less impressive turn...

...Trying to bring his earlier polemic up to date, he asks how the "trials, assassinations, funerals, and despair" of this past decade have changed the nature and the imperatives of the U.S...

...King's funeral is equally askew...

...A passionate manifesto marked by a swelling crescendo of Biblical lament and dread foreboding, The Fire Next Time was at once achingly personal and self-effacing...

...Their ranks are split, and they no longer form the militarist revolutionary force he had known...

...it commanded our profoundest attention even when Baldwin's accusing finger seemed to point too far and wide...

...His answer is riddled with ambiguity, about himself and the country...

...But most people, black and white, cannot live exclusively at this rhetorical pitch, for their basic problem is the simple quotidian necessity of getting along in this life...

...He refuses to grant that King's death at the hands of a demented criminal does not render the entire society demented or criminal...

...heightening, enlarging, exaggerating, distorting-these are the means of art...

...His account of Dr...

...But such observations would seem only Pollyannish to a horseman of the apocalypse like James Baldwin...

...Actually, for more white Americans than Baldwin cares to acknowledge, the reverse is the case: They are the most guilt-ridden people one can find-as confused and awkward and ineffectual as they may be, their pangs of conscience are real...

...These blinkers enable Baldwin to ignore Czechoslovakia and the death of Jan Masaryk, the Berlin blockade, and the 15 million persons imprisoned in Russian concentration camps...

...He often indulges, too, in a self-consciously coy arrogance about his "celebrity" status in the very world he claims to totally despise and reject...

...This is especially true of those early and devoted supporters of Baldwin's career as a writer, whom he now excoriates so maliciously...

...In this loose ramble of anecdote and deceptive generality, he slips continually into a magisterial preacher's contumely that condemns all of Western civilization, evaporating in the heat of excess any pragmatic force his statements might contain...

...his insurrectionary tactics have been abandoned by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who have come to recognize the immediate priorities of community life...

...Intellectuals and artists like James Baldwin can perhaps live with rhetorical postures, since they make their living dramatizing situations...

...Baldwin's attention can turn only perfunctorily to the silent horde of nameless mourners in the streets outside who filled "every inch of ground as far as the eye could see...

...That movement, he believes in retrospect, was doomed by its naively optimistic assumptions about American reality, and was brought to a bloody end with the assassinations of Malcolm X (who was killed, one should remember, by rival Muslims), Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King...

...Of the ambivalence some of them felt toward Joseph McCarthy, Baldwin asserts: ". . . this learned, civilized, intellectual-liberal debate cheerfully raged in its vacuum...

...Though he gives no names in his tirade against the liberal intellectuals of the 1950s, his case is weakened by being largely ad hominem...

...Near the beginning of the book Baldwin recounts, at speciously self-flagellating length, how he ran into Leonard Lyons one evening soon after Martin Luther King's death and told that eager magpie he would never again be able to put on the suit he wore to the funeral...

...King and his civil rights movement had not failed-because his tenacious bravery had indeed brought an end to Jim Crow and given Southern blacks the right to vote...

...While apocalyptic rhetoric may serve as an effective kind of moral warning, it cannot be taken for the mirror held up to reality that Baldwin tries to make of it in No Name in the Street...

...I did not say to what extent this free world menaced me, and millions like me...

...On the contrary, they are avid to know so much that they believe the apocryphal...

...The pretext for all this, of course, was the necessity of 'containing' Communism, which, they unblushingly informed me, was a threat to the 'free' world...

...In 1963, Baldwin scrutinized but finally rejected the separatist extremism of the Black Muslims, concluding that "we, the black and the white, deeply need each other if we are really to become a nation...

...Instead we are told how hard it was, since he arrived incognito, to get inside the church with all the important people, and exactly who they were...

...Baldwin's misguided propensity for sinister sweeping charges against white Americans leads him frequently to short-circuit his strong intelligence in No Name in the Street...

...To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task...

...In part, No Name in the Street is a bitter dirge for the civil rights movement of the 1960s, into which Baldwin had thrown himself with inexhaustible dedication...

...We know, and he knows, that James Baldwin was anything but sorry to leave Harlem...

...What he fails to see is that they were there in large measure because Dr...

...Earlier, he says the assassination altered him deeply, forcing him into a darker judgment of humanity than he had ever allowed himself to feel before...

...crisis...

...So the world-renowned writer took his suit and his guilt up to Harlem, and found that he and his old friend were now light-years apart...

...In 1972, however, he repudiates not only the practical possibility of reconciliation, but the idea itself, declaring that "as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the wickedest and the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today...

...His report of that terrible burial day in Atlanta should have been as stark and bitter and loving as his brilliant Notes of a Native Son, written some 20 years ago...

...Though he wrote, years ago, that "it is devoutly to be hoped that it will soon no longer be important to be black," he now ends unequivocally on the side of the Black Panthers and their aggressive doctrine of self-defense...