Widening Chasm

...At present Jones has passed only from the aesthetic to the political realm...

...But it would mark a loss, in intelligence and artistry alike, that neither Negroes nor whites can well afford...

...The hero of Jones's 1964 play, The Slave, has passed from aesthetics to politics to military action...

...Jones brilliantly demonstrated the validity of his choice in his perceptive and provocative book on Negro culture and Negro music, Blues People, published in 1963...

...The most recent essays in Home show a marked decline in stylistic grace, in clarity of expression, and in content of ideas...

...In a geographical sense "Home" stands for Harlem, the Negro city...

...Jones, by contrast, sought his own voice by breaking with the modern tradition absolutely...

...The consequences of his break, the intellectual and social dynamics thus set in motion, have only begun to run their course...

...in a metaphorical sense "Home" signifies Jones' rediscovery of Negro cultural' values and historic roots...

...Baldwin at his best was a modernist, a writer who wanted to associate himself with the aesthetic and moral aims of modern movements in the arts...

...I, Walker Vessels," the hero says, "single-handedly, and with no other advisor except my own ego, prompted a bloody ¦ situation where white and black people are killing each other...

...Both Baldwin and Jones made their starts not as public spokesmen or social commentators—roles each has lately taken up—but as writers, and in their primary efforts as literary men the difference between them shows up most sharply...

...This is as revealing a fact about the development of the Negro movement since the Montgomery bus boycott as any list of civil rights acts, freedom rides, or summer riots...

...The distance from Baldwin to Jones is not ten years of age or social change, but a gap between generations, a chasm between cultures—a chasm that is widening all the time...

...There is no growth in perception to be gained in reading Home, as there is in reading Blues People, as there is in listening to the "New Thing" jazz innovations of John Coltrane or Archie Shepp or Ornette Coleman...

...Instead he was led away from grays to blacks and whites, to polar extremes—away from insights to action...

...The essays collected in Home comprise his first report...

...If Jones continues in the direction Home suggests, one could not call it unreasonable, nor unjustified, nor wrong...

...Jones's rejection of modernism, and the new stances and styles it led him to adopt, turned him into a leader and spokesman for rebellious young writers and artists, white and Negro, in many parts of the country...

...But unlike several of the more interesting contemporary Negro jazz musicians, Jones has not succeeded in combining artistry with his new black nationalist militancy...

...The play takes place at a time when Negroes have risen in armed rebellion against white America...

...The dynamics of his break did not allow him to be satisfied with new insights into the subtle and chaotic ways Negro and white American cultures have mixed and influenced each other...

...Reviewed by Robert Sklar Tn age and public prominence as a -1 Negro literary figure, the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones occupies much the same position today that James Baldwin held a decade ago...

...But Jones's further development suggests that Blues People was a momentary stay, a briefly successful effort to hold together the complex and paradoxical pluralistic cultures and multiple minglings of Negro and white in America...

...In his new social and public role Jones no longer seems interested in the quality of his expression—no longer interested in communicating, at least with whites, at all...

...It would be foolish to criticize Jones for uncomfortable thoughts or for unfamiliar means of expressing them, just as it was foolish—so Jones reminded us in Blues People—for white critics prematurely to condemn Charlie Parker when he first played "bebop" jazz...