Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.
This style seems closer to Hemingway than to jazz or James; it suggests that Baldwin was as comfortable with the tradition he inherited from a generation of writers most of whom were at the height of their fame as he was starting to write. No young writers ever wish to give too much credit to the writers who could have been their father. They prefer to pay homage to grandfathers or to painters or musicians or ballet dancers or acrobats. It is one way of killing your father, to pretend that he made no difference to you while watching his cadences like a hawk.
So, too, in Baldwin’s short stories this plain opening style had not an ounce of James or of jazz. ‘The Rockpile’ opens: ‘Across the street from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile.’ ‘The Outing’ opens: ‘Each summer the church gave an outing.’ ‘Sonny’s Blues’ opens: ‘I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work.’
Between the publication of
Since World War II, certain names in recent American literature — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Faulkner — have acquired such weight and become so sacrosanct that they have been used as touchstones to reveal the understandable, but lamentable, inadequacy of the younger literary artists… Let one of us, the younger, attempt to create a restless, unhappy, free-wheeling heroine and we are immediately informed that Hemingway or Fitzgerald did the same thing better — infinitely better.
Having made clear, in grudging tone, his immense respect for these writers, Baldwin proceeded to demolish them.
It is useful… to remember in the case of Hemingway that his reputation began to be unassailable at the very instant that his work began that decline from which it never recovered — at about the time of
Having also demolished Faulkner (‘such indefensibly muddy work as “Intruder in the Dust” or “Requiem for a Nun”‘) and ‘the later development’ of Dos Passos (‘if one can call it that’) and Fitzgerald (‘there is no longer anything to say about Fitzgerald’), Baldwin considered the matter of America itself as a realm of failed imaginations.
The previously mentioned giants have at least one thing in common: their simplicity… It is the American way of looking on the world as a place to be corrected, and in which innocence is inexplicably lost. It is this almost inexpressible pain which lends such force to some of the early Hemingway stories — including ‘The Killers’ — and to the marvelous fishing sequence in ‘The Sun Also Rises’; and it is also the reason that Hemingway’s heroines seem so peculiarly sexless and manufactured.
Baldwin, in his attempt to establish a context for his own work, now invoked the spirit of Henry James by taking the unusual step of claiming James as a novelist who dealt with the matter of failed masculinity in America. In
What is the moral dilemma of Lambert Strether if not that, at the midnight hour, he realizes that he has, somehow, failed his manhood: that the ‘masculine sensibility’ as James puts it, has failed in him?… Strether’s triumph is that he is able to realize this, even though he knows it is too late for him to act on it. And it is James’ perception of this peculiar impossibility which makes him, until today, the greatest of our novelists. For the question which he raised, ricocheting it, so to speak, off the backs of his heroines, is the question which so torments us now. The question is this: How is an American to become a man? And this is precisely the same thing as asking: How is America to become a nation? By contrast with him, the giants who came to the fore between the two world wars merely lamented the necessity.
Baldwin understood the singular importance of the novel in America because he saw the dilemma his country faced as essentially an interior one, a poison that began in the individual spirit and only made its way then into politics. His political writing remains as raw and vivid as his fiction because he believed that social reform could not occur through legislation alone but through a reimagining of the private realm. Thus, for Baldwin, an examination of the individual soul as dramatized in fiction had immense power. It was, in the end, he saw, a matter of love, and he was not afraid to use the word. In his 1962
The loneliness of the cities described in Dos Passos is greater now than it has ever been before; and these cities are more dangerous now than they were before, and their citizens are yet more unloved. And those panaceas and formulas which have so spectacularly failed Dos Passos have also failed this country, and the world. The trouble is deeper than we wish to think: the trouble is in us. And we will never remake those cities, or conquer our cruel and unbearable human isolation — we will never establish human communities — until we stare our ghastly failure in the face.
Before he began to publish fiction, Baldwin was a reviewer with attitude, a writer with a high sense of aesthetic grandeur, an Edmund Wilson with real poison in his pen. In the
Moving from Russia with careful, youthful deliberation and delight, Baldwin in August 1948 did something close to many serious novelists’ hearts. He took on a popular writer much praised for his terse style and pace, in this case poor James M. Cain, author of
but he drooled, so to speak, as he said it… He writes with the stolid, humorless assurance of the American self-made man. Rather a great deal has been written concerning his breathless staccato ‘pace,’ his terse, corner- of-the-mouth ‘style,’ his significance as a recorder of the seamier side of American life. This is nonsense: Mr Cain writes fantasies and fantasies of the most unendurably mawkish and sentimental sort.
In January 1949 in an essay in
