James Baldwin - America's Angry Prophet

James Baldwin was a renowned American essayist, novelist, and civil rights activist from New York City. His career spanned several decades, from the 1950's to the 1980's, and he wrote like mad throughout.
His output was truly prodigious.

Baldwin was a world-traveler who lived a large part of his adult life as an ex-patriot in Europe, but his writing interest was always America: America's identity, America's racial issues, America's sexuality.
Like Hemingway, Baldwin did not attend college. He has been quoted as saying that he got his education reading novels in a New York Library, reading everything in it.

Unlike Hemingway, James Baldwin let his anger, his turmoil, and his passion bubble over onto the page writing sometimes with overstatement but always with conviction, honesty, and insight.

The Fire Next Time:

James Baldwin's essays are what put him on the map as a writer. Over the course of his career, Baldwin published numerous works of non-fiction with a focus on the difficulties of race relations in America. He wrote on the inter-racial issues of black and white Americans as well as the more subtle and less publicized issues of life in the black community as it related to the American identity.

The Fire Next Time represents James Baldwin's doing his best Jeremiah impression. The slim volume consists of two essays - one, a letter Baldwin addresses to his nephew concerning the hardships of the life of the boy's father and the hardships the boy himself is certain to face. It is a letter about being brave and strong in the face of difficulty.

Baldwin advises his nephew that mercy and compassion are in order, despite the garrulousness and stolid resistance of a world that would stamp out mercy and compassion, a world that would wear down a black man until he turned against himself, until betrayal of what is good in him becomes inevitable.

He tells his nephew to be strong and to protect his goodness and try, try very hard to see it in others.

The accompanying essay in James Baldwin's classic two-essay tract stokes the fire without remorse, pointing to America's dark future, saying that this darkness will be guaranteed unless something is done to adjust the bondage of the poor in their poverty in America, to alleviate the bitterness that festered in the hearts of a great many minorities who, just as American as anyone else because they too were born of this nation, who can only be pushed so far, who can only bend so far...without breaking.

Go Tell It on the Mountain:

When James Baldwin published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, some critics balked. The arena of the novel was not open to everyone to just jump in. Certain talents were required. This was, after all, the era of H.L. Menken and Alfred Kazin - a literary period in American letters that put critics at the top tier of the literary world much like the New Wave film movement in France which was contemporary. That French movement saw the rise of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Cocteau, who went from being on the fringes of film as writers and critics to being at the center of film-making, directing some of the 20^th centuries most watched "art" films.

Baldwin's foray into novel writing was not met with universal praise by the ruling critics. His essays were accepted as the work of a dynamo, perhaps a genius, of the essay form.

Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin's first novel is about a young man who experiences a spiritual crisis in the church of his father. The novel is largely autobiographical, as, it would seem, so much of his work was. Baldwin's account of coming to the mutual brink of condemnation and salvation is highly moving and evocative of the great angst of a young man who has in a nearly absolute sense no where to turn except to god.

The book certainly qualifies as an accomplishment, though it may not qualify as a "great novel". The flaw, if we can call it that, of Go Tell It on the Mountain comes in its prodigy, meaning, it is not the work of a mature novelist. The novel speaks rather directly to a man coming of age.

As a twenty year old, I read the book and felt that I had never read anything truer to my own experience. When I re-read the book several years later, I began to see the limits of consciousness and experience that frame the novel. Still a deeply spiritual tale, the experience of reading Go Tell It on the Mountain has become an impressive book of parts but no longer describes the richness and nuance of adult spiritual challenge, identity, and maturity.

Giovanni's Room:

James Baldwin's second novel does not suffer from the same flaw. Though it was published less than three years after Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room reads as the work of a patient writer.

Baldwin here crafts a book that is all of one piece - integral, unified, sound. He addresses a more limited set of themes and for the reduction in scope achieves a very eloquent and artful statement about what it means to be 1) American abroad and 2) a gay American abroad.

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I have often wondered why James Baldwin did not gain more critical acclaim. He was a prolific writer, an important writer, and an important American voice. He received distinguished fellowships. Yet none of his work garnered a major prize. James Baldwin did not win a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, or anything else that would suggest his stature as an important American writer.

Is this lack of accolade explained by the fact that James Baldwin took on sensitive issues of race and sexuality so directly? Despite my comments on his first novel as owning to a particular immaturity and in-cohesion, his later novels continued to gain in quality and force. If he did not write a single superlative tome, he at least created two classics - The Fire Next Time and Giovanni's Room - which would seem enough to set James Baldwin among the most notable writers of the second half of the 20^th century in America.

What other writers of his stature have been so little rewarded by critical praise? It's true that Pynchon has also not won any major awards, but he has received so much critical acclaim that his reputation has now outpaced his (considerable) talents.

We will end with this, somewhat elliptical, question then: Did Toni Morrison win James Baldwin's Nobel Prize for literature?