Blacks and the Blues

...Murray has expertly managed to give all the trendy bandwagons—red, black, blond, and olive—a wide berth...

...The title is the clue to Baldwin's intention of writing a novel in the manner of a blues ballad—Beale Street, in Memphis, was the stamping ground of the great blues composer W. C. Handy...

...Baldwin did not bludgeon the guilty white reader into reaching for his consoling and stuffed hair shirt...

...The essay was an extraordinarily self-assured performance for so young and so Harlem a writer...

...Will his baby ever know its daddy...

...I suspect that Train Whistle Guitar was originally conceived as the beginning of a much larger work...

...to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one's own destruction...

...in the mid-1950s, Baldwin was already in his 30s and had learned, like many other American writers before him, that what Europe had prepared him for, with taunting indirection, was America...

...blackness and whiteness did not matter...

...The gifted young maverick who wrote "Everybody's Protest Novel" a quarter of a century ago will be 50 this year and he has just published his fifth novel, If Beale Street Could Talk (Dial, 197 pp., $6.95...

...It is very likely that the long-standing contempt felt by a Southern Negro for "a promising young Greenwich Village intellectual from Harlem" accounts in part for the harshness of Murray's impeachment...

...By the time he returned to the U.S...

...But Murray's genuine stature in the contemporary black-American intelligentsia derives most powerfully from the wide-ranging and superbly thoughtful essays that he collected recently in The Omni-Americans...

...Where the tone of The Fire Next Time had been at once intensely personal and free of egoism, No Name in the Street revealed a Baldwin indecently self-important about his own celebrity...

...His real power as a writer is to be found in his autobiographical essays, particularly in that small and lacerating masterpiece, "Notes of a Native Son...

...Baldwin's novel is not a blues story, it is an ethnic soap opera—complete with cardboard characters shoved through pseudotragic charades of doom and catastrophe...

...Writers with a Cause such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Richard Wright, Baldwin argued, are not novelists but pamphleteers, and though their moral sincerity is unexceptionable, they reduce their characters to pawns on a chessboard of social injustice, members "of a Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by Science...

...Thus in his second novel, Giovanni's Room, he told the troubled story of some white homosexuals in Paris in the first person—out of a defiantly cocky need to prove that a Negro novelist could successfully obliterate the facts of race from his work, if not from his life...

...Unfortunately, the Puerto Rican woman goes mad before she can be persuaded to return to New York...

...and Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone are lazy and sentimental, full of hackneyed violence and tin-ear dialogue, thin and unrealized characters, speciously "shocking" melodrama...

...In these commentaries and animadversions, he has separated himself with outspoken determination from the platitudinous mainstream of black activism and aggressively hostile "ethnicity" (and will someone please try to find a less ugly word for that inescapable phenomenon...

...Overall, though, Murray is rarely off target...

...As a novelist, Murray accurately observes, Baldwin has made little attempt to practice what he preached at the start of his career, forgetting his youthful warning that "novels of oppression written by Negroes . . . actually reinforce...

...The elegiac compassion and unflinching self-scrutiny that had given his earlier essays such grace and authority were smothered by a nervous pomposity about the trivia of fame, and an ungovernable indulgence in the irresponsibilities of bigotry and hate...

...A 58-year-old black literary critic, scholar and cultural historian from Alabama who lives in New York, he has produced a frail, rather aimless little book, less a novel than a loose gathering of autobiographical fragments about Scooter, a black boy growing up in Gasoline Point, Alabama, during the 1920s...

...Yet Murray has strengths his novel does not display...

...Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law...

...Though she is depicted as a simple and unbookish girl, her narrator's voice keeps shifting from a tough and brutal Harlem idiom into sudden inexplicable flights of highly sophisticated literary imagery—the intrusive ventriloquist's voice, in fact, of James Baldwin...

...Like Baldwin, Murray strongly tries to invoke the spirit of the blues in his book, but he is not much more successful at catching their melancholy lyricism...

...Indeed, Baldwin has never been altogether at home in the novel...

...as it stands, it is painfully thin and attenuated, and the awkwardly mannered style set my teeth on edge much of the way through...

...The pigeonholes of protest, in sum, impose a false notion of order on the creative artist...

...As in all soap opera, we are left hanging in the end...

...There is no plot to speak of, just a kaleidoscope of bittersweet ghosts—family, friends, precociously sexy girls, and especially the two heroic coordinates in Scooter's "territory of the blues," the foot-loose guitar player Luzana Cholly and the honky-tonk pianist Stago-lee Dupas...

...Beyond its factitious plot and one-dimensional characters, If Beale Street Could Talk is rendered even more implausible by Tish's inconsistent rhetoric...

...Because it substitutes a confused theological fantasy of both the bad and the good life for the elusive realities, a book like Uncle Tom's Cabin or Native Son is actually "a rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is [his] categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended...

...In the nightmare of centuries of Negro suffering Baldwin found a fierce beauty, the moral transcendence of self-discovery and confirmation: "That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort . . . something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and, indeed, no church—-can teach...

...In the early 1960s, in his now characteristic pattern, Baldwin published a pedestrian novel, Another Country, and a magnificently eloquent memoir and lamentation, The Fire Next Time, a reflective inquiry, dark with foreboding, into the lessons his own private chaos could derive from black history...

...Europe did not of course prove to be the unconstrained color-blind paradise of Baldwin's naive expectations...

...The question of who I was had at last become a personal question, and the answer was to be found in me...

...Still, the insight proved immutable only for the duration of Baldwin's youth...

...The true business of the novelist, Baldwin insisted, was not the inflammatory manipulation of social responsibility and reform, but the far more difficult and courageous revelation of man's complexity...

...Fonny's real crime is that of living in the Village when he should have stayed uptown...

...Oddly, while he was programmatically right about the objectives of fiction for the artist, Baldwin's own novels have been on the whole uninteresting and fatally strained...

...Depending as it does on exaggeration and distortion and moralistic simplification, Baldwin passionately contended, the work of the protest novelist must never be confused with art...

...It did, however, make possible a personal change of perspective that enabled him to complete his first and best novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, an autobiographical chronicle of his evangelical-preacher father: "In America, the color of my skin had stood between myself and me...

...BLACKS AND THE BLUES BY PEARL K. BELL In 1949, early in his career, James Baldwin published a now legendary essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel," in which he took a stand that at the time was astonishing to encounter in a Negro novelist...

...Indeed, in Murray's view, too, Baldwin has become a writer remarkably like the Richard Wright he attacked...

...In his essays on black-studies programs, Harlem, William Styron's Nat Turner, and particularly in his long and penetrating analysis of "James Baldwin, Protest Fiction, and the Blues Tradition," Murray has always been his own man, irreverent and iconoclastic, resisting the seductive clubbiness of group-think no matter what its color or politics...

...Though I demur from some of Murray's emphases, and am at times repelled by his obsessive harping on the "social science survey technicians" who supposedly tyrannize so much contemporary thought about race, I feel only grateful admiration for his strong resistance to racial extremism and for his overriding concern with "a literary sense of the ambiguities and absurdities inherent in all human experience...

...He is best known for his impressionistic, eccentrically written South to a Very Old Place, an illuminating account of a journey of rediscovery and intellectual exploration that he made through the South in the late '60s, interviewing leading Southern writers in an attempt to learn how the region of his childhood has changed in the years since he went north for good...

...Like the Jamaican novelist and sociologist Orlando Patterson, who regards the particularistic and divisive social philosophy of ethnic pluralism as "one of the most tragic intellectual developments of our time," Albert Murray is appalled by the current vogue of ethno-centricity and, refusing to be intimidated by black or white racism, argues that "the people of the United States are being misled by misinformation to insist on exaggerating their ethnic differences...

...Tish's lovingly devoted family impoverishes itself in an effort to get Fonny out of jail and prove his innocence before the baby arrives, and Tish's mother even flies to San Juan to find Fonny's alleged victim...

...In this anguished, brilliantly moving memoir of the terrible summer of 1943, Baldwin tells of the death of his autocratic father a few hours before the birth of the man's last child, and of the rioting mob that smashed through Harlem on the day of the funeral...

...Until the early 1960s, that answer, for Baldwin, consisted largely of a literary and intellectual cosmopolitanism that freed him, for a time, from the racial shibboleths and platitudes of "Negro" fiction...

...the principles which activate the oppression they decry...

...This violently bitter requiem for the civil rights movement, published in 1972, degenerated almost immediately into indiscriminate sniping, mindless contumely ("White Americans are probably the wickedest and most dangerous people .. . in the world today"), myopic nonsense ("White America remains unable to believe that black America's grievances are real"), and paranoid malediction (America is "the Fourth Reich...

...Especially crucial for him was the fact that the nation was rumbling with the tumultuous beginnings of the civil rights movement and black nationalism...

...One did not have to consent to Baldwin's prophecy of doom and conflagration in order to be moved by his vision of black suffering...

...Needless to say, in the eyes of contemptuous black militants like Eldridge Cleaver, Harold Cruse and Julian Mayfield, the essay failed to absolve him of the venal sin of fraternization with white liberal intellectuals...

...Yet shortly before it was published, Baldwin had in fact left Manhattan and America altogether, hoping through exile in Europe to escape from a suffocating society that not only seemed to lock every black writer into the crude simplicities of propaganda and protest, but was also peculiarly inimical to a homosexual like himself...

...Albert Murray's first novel, Train Whistle Guitar (McGraw-Hill, 183 pp., $6.95), fails for different reasons...

...In the confluence of these three profoundly irreversible events, young Baldwin learned to understand the tragic folly of bitterness and hatred and despair: "The dead man mattered, the new life mattered...

...There is no hint in Beale Street, though, of the sardonic blues spirit that Ralph Ellison transmuted so effectively in Invisible Man...

...But what finally accounts for the book's mawkish incredibility is that it was conceived and written as a social indictment, and not as a work of the creative imagination...

...Tish Rivers, the 19-year-old Harlem girl who tells the story, is pregnant by her childhood sweetheart, Fonny Hunt, a young sculptor who has been jailed by an evil white policeman on the false charge of raping a Puerto Rican woman...

...It is not only Baldwin's shallowest work of fiction, but ironically it commits those very atrocities of distortion and stereotyping that he long ago deplored in Native Son: Richard Wright's acquiescence in the pervasive American fantasy that the Negro "is a social and not a personal or a human problem...

...Yet less than a decade later, in No Name in the Street, Baldwin repudiated temperateness and insight to take up the torch of apocalypse...

...He has cast a coldly skeptical eye on the sloganeering and hysteria, whatever their literary costuming, that incite blacks to violence and whites to mea culpa, and cripple the rational judgments of grown men...

...Will Fonny get out of jail...

...If Giovanni's Room was a startling experiment in audacity, it was nonetheless a feeble novel...

...Only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves...

...in Europe, that barrier was down...

...But I think he is wrong-headed when he dismisses all of Baldwin's essays as mere polemics, and sneers that Baldwin has never written about the "sustaining actualities of Negro tradition...

...They don't want to be "ethnics" but individuals...

...they debase and misrepresent the intricately perplexing individual nature of black experience, replacing the troubled, authentic singularity of personal identity with a meretricious, high-minded collective anonymity...

...Passionate and lucid in its melancholy recognitions, in its beautifully sustained tension of rage and intelligence, The Fire Next Time was a black jeremiad spoken with incredible dignity...

...This was precisely James Baldwin's concern as a young writer, of course, and it becomes the basis of Murray's critical assessment of Baldwin's work...

...Murray and Patterson are among the few contemporary black writers who have the rational intelligence to know and the guts to say that racial separatism is demented and destructive...