The cross of redemption Uncollected writings

Review by Choice Review

Picking up where the Library of America's James Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. by Toni Morrison (1998), leaves off, this volume gathers uncollected writings and thus broadens the reader's perspective on Baldwin and his work. A novelist as well as a scholar, Kenan (Univ. of Memphis) includes essays, speeches, letters, book reviews, some book forewords and afterwords, sketches of Sidney Poitier and boxers Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, and the short story "The Death of a Prophet." He calls the collection "a GPS map of the geography of [Baldwin's] mind's progress." And indeed the collection serves just that purpose, leading the reader through Baldwin's impressions of prizefighting, black nationalism, the role of the church, the blues, and other towering writers of the 20th century. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. D. J. Rosenthal John Carroll University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

IN an essay about his friendship with Norman Mailer, written in early 1961 at the peak of his eloquence, James Baldwin recalled his reaction to the news that Mailer was running for mayor of New York. Baldwin initially dismissed the rumor as a joke, until "it became hideously clear that it was not a joke at all. I was furious. I thought . . . you're copping out . . . It's not your job" Within a year or two, Baldwin himself had accepted a new job. Having attained prominence over the course of the 1950s as a novelist, with "Go Tell It on the Mountain" and "Giovanni's Room," and as a reporter issuing passionately perceptive dispatches from Paris, Harlem and the disintegrating South, Baldwin found himself increasingly in demand as a speaker on behalf of the civil rights movement. After publication of "The Fire Next Time" in 1963, he became a celebrity presence at events - a "face." At the end of the decade, however, demoralized by the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, he suffered a form of nervous collapse and retreated to the French hilltop village of St.-Paul-de-Vence, near Nice, where he lived in subdued peace and where he died in 1987. "Since Martin's death . . . something has altered in me," he wrote in his account of the tumultuous period, "No Name in the Street." "Something has gone away." While the "something" came back to Baldwin the man, mightily impressive and entertaining in private, as electrifying a public speaker as any who ever stepped onto a platform, it revisited the writer only in patches. The habit of sermonizing, once established, was hard to break. "The Cross of Redemption" is intended as a companion volume to the Library of America "Collected Essays," which appeared in 1998. It contains essays, reviews and forewords to the books of others. All are engaging in their way. The reviews, mostly dating from the 1940s, are among the best-written pieces in the book. Many of the articles, however, began as talks, and no effort has been made to disguise their origins, leaving untidy loose ends. Baldwin usually improvised on such occasions, or as he puts it, played by ear. It was probably thrilling to be present in Washington in November 1963 when, fumbling to create a train of thought, he" said, "Americans are the youngest country, the largest country, and the strongest country, we like to say, and yet the very notion of change, real change throws Americans into a panic," but it conveys little almost five decades later (and still wouldn't even if the grammar had been silently corrected). The transcript of a speech made in 1971 in support of the Soledad Brothers begins, "I can't keep you very long, because the hall's going to close very soon, and I must tell you this: that I was very honored and very excited to be here. . . ." As the pressure on his time and talent increased, Baldwin allowed hyperbole to dictate thought and feeling, and rhetoric to overwhelm sense. He became a speechmaker even in print. "We are the generation that must throw everything into the endeavor to remake America into what we say we want it to be," he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1962. "Without this endeavor, we will perish. However immoral or subversive this may sound to some, it is the writer who must always remember that morality, if it is to remain or become morality, must be perpetually examined, cracked, changed, made new." Is the generation referred to different from any other in its "endeavor to remake America"? Since it evidently did not perish, should we conclude that it succeeded? In a speech the following year, Baldwin told a mostly white audience: "There is nothing you can do for me. There is nothing you can do for Negroes." A few years later he declared that "the bulk of the white population" was "beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation." So much for the all-inclusive generation. By 1970, he was urging blacks to "render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber." No matter what his attitudes might suggest, Baldwin enjoyed the attention of editors, and the best pieces here suggest a steadying hand behind the furious pen. His fine report on the first Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston fight of September 1962, which ended in a firstround victory for the challenger Liston, is free of the posturing that is apt to affect the prose of writers, too long in the study, at the scent of men in action. He backed Patterson, but sympathized with Liston, who reminded him of "big, black men I have known who acquired the reputation of being tough in order to conceal the fact that they weren't hard." The report appeared in the men's magazine Nugget, and it is likely that his editor, mindful of a broad audience, cut the flammable fat to a minimum. Two pieces that originated in Playboy, one on blues lyrics, are similarly reined in, and stronger for being so. Baldwin concludes "The Uses of the Blues" by comparing a statement from Henry James (a frequent point of reference) with a verse sung by Bessie Smith. And it is true that James's sentence is easily imagined as the first line of an AAB blues: "Sorrow wears and uses us but we wear and use it too" - though it takes Baldwin to point it out. A series of letters written to his agent during a trip to Israel and Turkey, published in 1963 in Harper's magazine as "Letters From a Journey," would likewise have earned its place in the long-anticipated but never realized follow-up to Baldwin's two great collections, "Notes of a Native Son" (1955) and "Nobody Knows My Name" (1961). MY favorite essay in this book, though it is not the best, is the one that gives it its title: "Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption." The reason is simple: I commissioned it. The occasion was the publication, in 1979, of James Lincoln Collier's study "The Making of Jazz." I wrote to Baldwin from Scotland to ask if he would review Collier's history for the quarterly magazine of which I was editor, The New Edinburgh Review (not the "Edinburgh Review," as Randall Kenan, the editor of this collection, has it). He mentioned jazz often in his work, I said, but had never written a complete essay on the subject; perhaps he would welcome the chance to do so? There followed a series of calls, haltingly polite on my part, warm and encouraging on his - "I'm working on it, baby" - which ended only when I ingenuously said that the cover of the magazine was ready, and had his picture on it. "I'm on the cover!" Baldwin shrieked down the line from Provence. "Oh baby. ... I'd better get to work." It is an improvisational piece, tough on Collier's rational assessments, sloppy in places as once-great jazzmen often are ("I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians," he stated in 1962), but with passages that could have emerged from no other instrument. Black American music, Baldwin wrote, "begins on the auction block": "Whoever pretends that the slave mother does not weep, until this hour, for her slaughtered son, that the son does not weep for his slaughtered father . . . - whoever cannot face this can never pay the price for the beat which is the key to music, and the key to life." Kenan has modified Baldwin's stressed beat to a flatter "beat" between quotation marks, which is typical of the lazy presentation of this volume. A speech is said to have been delivered in "Westminster, England," which is like saying "Queens, U.S.A." We are told that Baldwin hoped to make a film about George Jackson, "according to his biographer." Which one? When Baldwin informs readers of The Urbanite in 1961 that "they will be hearing a great deal from me" as the magazine's theater critic, it is surely the editor's job to say whether they did or not. (He wrote one more column, not included here, for the short-lived journal.) And so on. At half the length, with articles arranged in straight chronological order and given generous endnotes, "The Cross of Redemption" might have been a book worthy of this prodigiously gifted, twinheaded writer. But the posthumous volume that those who value Baldwin are impatient to read is a fully annotated edition of his correspondence. James Campbell's latest book is "Syncopations." He is an editor at The Times Literary Supplement in London. His biography "Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin" was reissued in 2005.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 12, 2010]

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Review by Booklist Review

Growing up poor, black, and gay in a household dominated by an abusive preacher stepfather, Baldwin gained perspective on every prejudice indulged by America in his lifetime an epic saga from poverty and obscurity to comfort and world renown. This collection offers Baldwin's previously uncollected essays, profiles, reviews, and letters, fully displaying the breadth of his struggle to come to terms with the injustice and, worse, the immorality of life in a nation that prided itself on equality. Baldwin is biting and insightful in his critique of religious fundamentalism, the prospects of a black president, the hypocrisy of the American art and cultural scene, the challenges of black nationalism, and the complexities of race and identity. In the long passages of his essays and the short, acerbic comments in his interviews, Baldwin shows a masterful sweep of language and ideas and feelings that continues to resonate.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Baldwin's published essays have been already twice collected (The Price of the Ticket and the posthumous Library of America Collected Essays), but there are gems in this collection compiled by Kenan (Let the Dead Bury the Dead): "The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston" is as impeccably crafted as a short story; "Blacks and Jews" captures the speaking Baldwin and echoes the call-and-response tradition. The 54 pieces, none previously appearing in book form, range from Baldwin's first published book review in 1947 to a 1984 colloquy with college students. Baldwin's topic can often be subsumed under race, but he most consistently wrestles with questions of moral integrity-in the language ("The Uses of the Blues"), in the artist's work ("Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare"), in the assessment of history ("On Being White... and Other Lies"), and in one's personal life ("To Crush a Serpent"). Kenan's introduction and headnotes are models of critical good sense; his awareness of both "Baldwin's achievements that beggar the imagination," and of the "grab bag" quality of some pieces makes him the perfect shepherd for these "lost" works. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

"An omnigatherum" of the ideas Baldwin "revisited most often," this compilation edited by Kenan (English, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; The Fire This Time) is intended to serve as a companion to the Library of America's James Baldwin: Collected Essays. The essays and speeches included range widely over literature, politics, and the arts, covering such diverse topics as "The Artist's Struggle for Integrity," "The Uses of the Blues," and "Blacks and Jews." There are profiles of actor Sidney Poitier and of boxers Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, followed by a selection of letters, some forewords and afterwords, and reviews. Among these pieces are a foreword to Black Panther leader Bobby Seale's A Lonely Rage (1978) and a letter to Angela Davis in prison, signs perhaps of Baldwin's increasing radicalization. Underlying all of these writings is Baldwin's indictment of America for its hypocritical attitude on race. VERDICT These previously published writings, gleaned for the most part from a variety of periodical sources, have a more powerful resonance when read together in book form. A useful addition for African American scholars.-William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A grab bag of pieces from novelist and firebrand Baldwin (19241987), varying in quality but marked by his trademark ferocity.The author's best-known and most powerful nonfiction pieces have long been available in book form (The Price of the Ticket, 1985, etc.), so inevitably this book has a B-list feel to it. Most disposable are the book reviews he wrote in the late '40s, which reveal a writer struggling to find his voice, and in which he takes swipes at Maxim Gorky, Erskine Caldwell and James M. Cain with little subtlety or insight. But by the late '50s and early '60s, Baldwin's thinking about American racism matured, balancing reason and outrage, and many of the pieces are worthy companions to his provocative essay collection The Fire Next Time (1963). In "As Much Truth as One Can Bear," published in 1962, he pleads for an American literature that abandons lost-innocence themes embraced by Hemingway and Faulkner, and throughout his '60s essays he critiques an American society that had failed to face its hypocrisy head-on. The book is perhaps best read as a showcase for Baldwin's versatilityhe was comfortable covering theater, music and sports through the filter of race. In a long-form reported piece on the Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston prizefight in 1962, the author displays an admirable eye for detail of the boxers as well as the reporters and hangers-on. Similarly, a series of letters from Turkey, Israel and France expose his private concerns about his work as he was finishing his controversial novel Another Country (1962), while the transcript of a 1984 panel on blacks and Jews provides evidence of how well Baldwin could think on the fly.There are too many ephemeral or weakly written pieces to appeal beyond Baldwin's devoted admirers, but the best of the '60s essays underscore the reasons his work endures.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare   Every writer in the English language, I should imagine, has at some point hated Shakespeare, has turned away from that monstrous achieve­ment with a kind of sick envy. In my most anti-English days I condemned him as a chauvinist ("this England" indeed!) and because I felt it so bitterly anomalous that a black man should be forced to deal with the English lan­guage at all--should be forced to assault the English language in order to be able to speak--I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression.   Again, in the way that some Jews bitterly and mistakenly resent Shylock, I was dubious about Othello (what did he see in Desdemona?) and bitter about Caliban. His great vast gallery of people, whose reality was as con­tradictory as it was unanswerable, unspeakably oppressed me. I was resenting, of course, the assault on my simplicity; and, in another way, I was a victim of that loveless education which causes so many schoolboys to detest Shakespeare. But I feared him, too, feared him because, in his hands, the English language became the mightiest of instruments. No one would ever write that way again. No one would ever be able to match, much less surpass, him.   Well, I was young and missed the point entirely, was unable to go behind the words and, as it were, the diction, to what the poet was saying. I still remember my shock when I finally heard these lines from the murder scene in Julius Caesar. The assassins are washing their hands in Caesar's blood. Cassius says:   Stoop then, and wash.--How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, In states unborn and accents yet unknown!   What I suddenly heard, for the first time, was manifold. It was the voice of lonely, dedicated, deluded Cassius, whose life had never been real for me before--I suddenly seemed to know what this moment meant to him. But beneath and beyond that voice I also heard a note yet more rigorous and impersonal--and contemporary: that "lofty scene," in all its blood and nec­essary folly, its blind and necessary pain, was thrown into a perspective which has never left my mind. Just so, indeed, is the heedless State over­thrown by men, who, in order to overthrow it, have had to achieve a des­perate single- mindedness. And this single- mindedness, which we think of (why?) as ennobling, also operates, and much more surely, to distort and diminish a man--to distort and diminish us all, even, or perhaps especially, those whose needs and whose energy made the overthrow of the State inevitable, necessary, and just.   And the terrible thing about this play, for me--it is not necessarily my favorite play, whatever that means, but it is the play which I first, so to speak, discovered--is the tension it relentlessly sustains between individual ambition, self- conscious, deluded, idealistic, or corrupt, and the blind, mindless passion which drives the individual no less than it drives the mob. "I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet...I am not Cinna the conspir­ator"--that cry rings in my ears. And the mob's response: "Tear him for his bad verses!" And yet--though one howled with Cinna and felt his terrible rise, at the hands of his countrymen, to death, it was impossible to hate the mob. Or, worse than impossible, useless; for here we were, at once howl­ing and being torn to pieces, the only receptacles of evil and the only recep­tacles of nobility to be found in all the universe. But the play does not even suggest that we have the perception to know evil from good or that such a distinction can ever be clear: "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones . . ." Once one has begun to suspect this much about the world--once one has begun to suspect, that is, that one is not, and never will be, innocent, for the reason that no one is--some of the self- protective veils between oneself and reality begin to fall away. It is probably of some significance, though we cannot pursue it here, that my first real apprehension of Shake­speare came when I was living in France, and thinking and speaking in French. The necessity of mastering a foreign language forced me into a new relationship to my own. (It was also in France, therefore, that I began to read the Bible again.)   My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter in quite another way. If the language was not my own, it might be the fault of the language; but it might also be my fault. Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.   In support of this possibility, I had two mighty witnesses: my black ancestors, who evolved the sorrow songs, the blues, and jazz, and created an entirely new idiom in an overwhelmingly hostile place; and Shake­speare, who was the last bawdy writer in the English language. What I began to see--especially since, as I say, I was living and speaking in French--is that it is experience which shapes a language; and it is language which controls an experience. The structure of the French language told me something of the French experience, and also something of the French expectations--which were certainly not the American expectations, since the French daily and hourly said things which the Americans could not say at all. (Not even in French.) Similarly, the language with which I had grown up had certainly not been the King's English. An immense experience had forged this language; it had been (and remains) one of the tools of a peo­ple's survival, and it revealed expectations which no white American could easily entertain. The authority of this language was in its candor, its irony, its density, and its beat: this was the authority of the language which pro­duced me, and it was also the authority of Shakespeare.   Again, I was listening very hard to jazz and hoping, one day, to translate it into language, and Shakespeare's bawdiness became very important to me, since bawdiness was one of the elements of jazz and revealed a tremendous, loving, and realistic respect for the body, and that ineffable force which the body contains, which Americans have mostly lost, which I had experienced only among Negroes, and of which I had then been taught to be ashamed.   My relationship, then, to the language of Shakespeare revealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past. Under this light, this revelation, both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the way a flower opens at morning, but more probably the way an atrophied muscle begins to function, or frozen fingers to thaw.   The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love--by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it--no time can be easy if one is living through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw: his public streets and his private streets, which are always so mysteriously and inexorably con­nected; but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer--to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see not--I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them.   That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all bat­tles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people --all people!-- who search in the rubble for a sign or a wit­ness will be able to find him there.   (1964) Excerpted from The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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