James Baldwin's Apotheosis

Summary

James Baldwin’s Apotheosis The last time I wrote about James Baldwin, in the late 1990s, I concluded that his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was his best, and that his second, Giovanni’s Room, was sentimental, artificial, and populated by stock figures—in fact I agreed with Norman Mailer’s assessment that the novel, dealing openly in Eisenhower’s America with homosexuality, was “brave” but “bad.” Now hailed as a seminal work, it had been turned down by Knopf, who had published Go Tell It on the Mountain. (The novel was eventually published by Dial.) Baldwin assumed that Knopf had expected him to take up the mantle of “Negro writer” and stick to racial subjects, which Giovanni’s Room did not address; or perhaps they had been made nervous by the gay content. But Henry Carlisle, the editor who ruled against it, was not an unworldly man, and I think one can take at face value his objection that the book lacked credible characters and would not enhance the author’s reputation. Baldwin’s fiction continued to decline from there. His essays, too, at first so potent, shocking, and pungent, lost their kick after 1963’s brilliant The Fire Next Time; by 1972, with No Name in the Street, his thinking had slackened, and eventually it petrified. I still stand by these judgments, while being bowled over by Baldwin’s better work and enormously sympathetic to the man himself, insofar as I can reconstruct him from his writings and the reminiscences of those who knew him. In the later part of the twentieth century I was far from being alone in this assessment. The apex of Baldwin’s career was probably 1963, when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. In fact his reputation had begun its decline in the later ’60s, when Baldwin, as Hilton Als writes,[1] “was finding impersonating a Black writer more seductive than being an artist. . . . By the time the Black Power movement had started to ebb, Baldwin was adrift not only politically but aesthetically.” In the 1970s and ’80s,...