Baldwin in a black context

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33917, 9 August 1975, Page 10

Baldwin in a black context

James Baldwin — A Critical Study. By Stanley Macebuh. Michael Joseph. 194 pp. Notes, bibliography and index. N.Z. price $8.70. A Dialogue. James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. Michael Joseph. 112 pp. N.Z. price $6.75. Stanley Macebuh, a Nigerian teaching’ English at City College in New York, has produced the first fulllength study of the writing of James Baldwin. Mr Baldwin has a number of years writing in him yet (he has published two books since this study was completed). Books like this tend to be produced about living writers to the extent that the writers are prescribed in universities and therefore need to be explained — as if they are not worthy to be taught unless they are too difficult to reach the audience they write for; or that students do not find writing significant unless it has been written about However, Professor Macebuh’s book is in some respects a useful one. The accounts of Baldwin’s novels are straightforward and reasonably perceptive and provide careful analyses of inter-reactions of characters and themes, and of the development of Baldwin’s art from its therapeutic-autobiographical base into the explicitly socio-political concerns of the later work. Professor Macebuh is, however, more interestingly concerned to place Baldwin’s fiction within the context of Baldwin’s blackness, and to argue the need for a literary criticism which must necessarily take account of nonliterary considerations behind all black writing He argues convincingly for a A

continuing black tradition in similarities of concern and expression (particularly in attitudes to religion and sexuality) from Booker T. Washington through to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. The thesis is thorough and welldocumented, and he is particularly interesting on the effect of the Black Church and its impassioned millennialism in the creation of a guilt-ridden apocalyptic morality in writers like Baldwin.

It is puzzling, however, that Professor Macebuh makes little mention of two distinctive aspects of Baldwin’s life and work; his continuing status as an expatriate, and his mastery of a lucid and very beautiful prose. Both are slightly contradictory elements within Baldwin’s concern for a distinctively black art. The question of an appropriate style has been a crucial one for black American writers, and it is also puzzling that Professor Macebuh’s efforts to establish a tradition exclude any consideration of the blacks’ most distinctive and autonomous earlier idioms — blues and spirituals. “A Dialogue” is in no way to be compared with “A Rap On Race.” Baldwin’s fascinating conversation with Margaret Mead. ‘‘A Dialogue” is an overpriced and underweight transcript of a television discussion between Baldwin and a young black poet and consists largely of expressions of mutual admiration. “I’ve been having revelations a lot lately; it’s a personal thing,” says Ms Giovanni at one point. They are personal enough not to be audible here.