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NOVEMBER 25, 2010
Darryl Pinckney
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The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings
by James Baldwin, edited and with an introduction by Randall Kenan
Pantheon, 304 pp., $26.95
Nancy Crampton
James Baldwin, New York City, 1976
Life never bribed him to look at anything but the soul, Henry James said of Emerson, and one could say
the same of James Baldwin, with a similar suggestion that the price for his purity was blindness about
some other things in life. Baldwin possessed to an extraordinary degree what James called Emerson’s
“special capacity for moral experience.” He, too, is persuasive in his antimaterialism. Baldwin, like
Emerson, renounced the pulpit—he had been a fiery boy preacher in Harlem—and readers have found in the
writings of each the atmosphere of church.
It’s not that Emerson and Baldwin have much in common as writers. Harlem was not Concord. Except for his
visits to England, Emerson stayed put for fifty years and Baldwin spent his adult life in search of a
home. He left Harlem for Greenwich Village in the early 1940s, left Greenwich Village for Paris in 1948,
and spent much time in Paris, Turkey, and the South of France between the 1950s and the 1980s. Yet
Baldwin and Emerson both can speak directly to another person’s soul, as James would have it, in a way
that “seems to go back to the roots of our feelings, to where conduct and manhood begin.”
Baldwin, as much as Emerson, is a legatee of certain Nonconformist beliefs—that every person is a carrier
of the divine spark, for instance, an idea that became secular in the time of the American Revolution
through arguments regarding the authority of the individual in a political democracy. If this is one of
the founding traditions of American radicalism, then it links the abolitionism of Emerson’s day with the
civil rights movement of Baldwin’s. Many intellectuals in the 1960s were aware that the freedom movement
was a taking up of what had been left brutally undone since Emancipation. The antislavery cause of a
century earlier offered to civil rights activists examples of individual conscience as judge of unjust
government and its laws. When the protests of the late 1950s and 1960s that Baldwin wrote about brought
the Paris expatriate back to the US, the connection between racial justice and democracy in America was
once again at the center of the nation’s politics, asking every citizen to realize that his or her
liberty was not freedom so long as other Americans were being denied their rights.
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The political goals of the civil rights movement that Baldwin made himself a witness for, as an essayist,
novelist, and activist, were partially realized with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even the angry black nationalists of the 1960s who attacked Baldwin as a queer
and a darling of white liberals accomplished something in the long run. They transformed the public
psychology of race, combating on an unprecedented scale the dogma of racial inferiority. Still, Baldwin
was as fearless an exponent of racial justice as any of the black nationalists. He famously told the
startled Robert Kennedy that young blacks could not be expected to serve loyally in the Vietnam War.
Consequently, he was hurt when the Black Panthers’ Eldridge Cleaver, in Soul on Ice (1968), wrote that
“the racial deathwish” was the driving force in James Baldwin because he, a gay black man, had been
“castrated” by the white man, and was, moreover, frustrated in his desire to have a baby by a white man,
to absorb a white lover’s whiteness. Baldwin, remembered as controlled, elegant, intense, and polite,
refused at the time to show in public how wounding such attacks were.
For all the efforts of black activists, neither poverty nor racism was eradicated, and discrepancies
between the standard of living of whites and of blacks only increased over the years. Baldwin died in
1987, when the conservative reaction presided over by Ronald Reagan, “the third-rate, failed, ex–Warner
Brothers contract player,” threatened to reverse the gains of what historians sometimes call the Second
Reconstruction. Americans were told by some commentators how exhausted they were with the subject of
racial justice. “That the western world has forgotten that such a thing as the moral choice exists, my
history, my flesh, and my soul bear witness,” Baldwin wrote in “An Open Letter to the Born Again” in 1979
and reprinted in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985. For the remainder of his life
he seemed one of the casualties of the freedom movement. He would say that what was wrong with the
country was still deeply wrong.
The late uncollected pieces that Baldwin included in The Price of the Ticket were written by a man who
remembered himself as a youth with “murder in his heart.” Just as Baldwin in his later fiction hoped to
have another blockbuster like Another Country (1962), so he could sometimes in his later essays seem to
be looking to arouse again the sort of controversy that attended the publication of his inflammatory
essay on race relations, The Fire Next Time (1963), much of which had appeared in The New Yorker. In the
first issue of The New York Review, F.W. Dupee argued that Baldwin had substituted prophecy for analysis
and in so doing risked losing his grasp of his great theme, freedom.1 In retrospect, Baldwin in parts of
The Fire Next Time can sound somewhat naive about the political process. He certainly overestimated the
concern white Americans had about how racial injustice was affecting the moral atmosphere of the country.
But it’s understandable that he believed in 1963 that black people held the key to the nation’s political
future: nothing like the mass protests of those days had ever happened before.
Much of the considerable writing on James Baldwin holds that the probings and provocations of Notes of a
Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time are more engaging than the overt
expressions of his disillusionment, starting with No Name in the Street (1972). Implicit in the
comparison is a judgment about integration and black separatism, as though his nuanced work belongs to a
hopeful time of racial dialogue and his excoriations to the simplicity of his militancy. But there has
been all along a black resistance, so to speak, to the critical view that there came a falling off in
Baldwin’s work once he had given himself over to forever haranguing Western society. He had stirred the
waters with The Fire Next Time, and in the run-up to the 1980 presidential election he again sounded some
alarmist chords in a futile effort to reignite in black voters a sense of political urgency:
Therefore, in a couple of days, blacks may be using the vote to outwit the Final Solution. Yes. The Final
Solution. No black person can afford to forget that the history of this country is genocidal from where
the buffalo once roamed to where our ancestors were slaughtered (from New Orleans to New York, from
Birmingham to Boston) and to the Caribbean and to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to Saigon. Oh, yes, let
freedom ring.
Black critics, especially, have concentrated on what they see as the valor in such political statements,
and they praise his last novels, If Beale Street Could Talk (1973) and Just Above My Head (1979), for
being proudly pro-black, for depicting loving and supportive black families. They argue that Baldwin
sacrificed his popularity with the white critical establishment because he insisted on telling American
society discomfiting truths. The exception is Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), Baldwin’s troubled
account of the gruesome Atlanta case in which Wayne Williams was arrested in connection with twenty-eight
murders, mostly of children, and was eventually convicted of two of them. Few have defended the book or
even tried to explain it.
Meanwhile, young scholars look for something fresh to say about Baldwin, to free him from the biography
of his early triumphs leading, by way of the assassinations and violence of the 1960s, to late despair.
Because of the passage of time, their distance, they examine Baldwin as someone who shows how white
America was influenced by black America, and not just in music, and not the usual other way around, that
of whites influencing blacks.
Some of the young scholars who want to reconsider Baldwin also have an interest in gender studies. They
revere him not only for his pioneering fiction about homosexuality, but for his meditation on masculinity
and constricting American ideas of sexuality, “Here Be Dragons,” published in 1985, one of only two
essays to address sexuality directly that he published in his lifetime. Randall Kenan, the editor of The
Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, is of the generation of young black gay writers for whom
Baldwin is a sort of spiritual father.
Baldwin was sure he had to kill off the straightforward realism of Richard Wright in order to heed Henry
James, but Kenan didn’t have to set aside his racial identity before he could embrace a queer antecedent.
Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits (1989), is the coming-of-age story of a black gay youth, and
the stories collected in Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992) are mostly about what it means to be black,
poor, and gay in the South. He has written a biography of Baldwin for young readers, and The Fire This
Time (2007) is Kenan’s homage to Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which created a sensation in 1963, the
year Kenan was born. Where Baldwin is stirring in denouncing complacent American racism, Kenan’s
commentary on what has and has not changed in the racial situation in the US in the years since is tepid,
but nevertheless he shows himself a sensitive interpreter of Baldwin’s intentions.
In his introduction to The Cross of Redemption, Kenan says that he had subscribed to the view that
Baldwin in his last years was bitter and unhappy:
Journalists often quoted the interviews that Baldwin gave in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the
height of the Vietnam War and in the wake of so much death and an American landscape pockmarked with
riot-ruined cities.
However, Kenan feels that Baldwin was still producing outstanding work, including The Devil Finds Work
(1976), his retelling of his life through the motion pictures he grew up on; a discussion of the
childhood torments caused by his appearance, for instance, is centered on the Bette Davis film 20,000
Years in Sing Sing. As Baldwin moved into the 1980s and then turned sixty, Kenan writes, “life was rich,
despite what the media would have led us to believe.”
Kenan means for The Cross of Redemption to be a companion to the Library of America edition of Baldwin’s
Collected Essays (1998). The fifty-four previously uncollected pieces range from Baldwin’s earliest book
reviews, published in The New Leader in 1947, to his denunciations of the Christian right, written not
long before his death. Included are speeches from rallies in the 1960s; open letters, such as his fiery
letter in 1970 to Angela Davis when she was incarcerated, in which he declared that “the enormous
revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the
beginning or the end of America”; and a memoir of playwright Lorraine Hansberry when she, too, confronted
Robert Kennedy and asked him for a “moral commitment” to combat racism.
Sedat Pakay
James Baldwin in the Blue Mosque, Istanbul, 1965
Not everything great writers do has to be great. We are interested in their miscellaneous writing because
we want to go on discovering things by them and things about them. Baldwin never fails to move one
somehow. Anguish has your number; it knows where you live, he said. Baldwin in his essays depends on what
he can bring to bear from his personal history. In this volume, as in all his essays on race and
politics, his premise is that the Negro Problem is in fact a white problem. For conditions to improve for
black people, profound change would have to come to white America.
Kenan would perhaps say that those people put off by the radicalism of Baldwin’s late phase have not paid
close enough attention to how radical he was already early on. The Cross of Redemption reminds us that
Baldwin was, indeed, taking white liberals to task for the failures and self-congratulation of their
social imagination some time before he was dismissed by black militants as irrelevant and out of date.
“The American way of life has failed—to make people happier or to make them better,” Baldwin declared
when Eisenhower was in the White House. To become a revolutionary country was the only hope America had,
he was saying at the beginning of the Kennedy administration. The standards by which middle-class
Americans lived had to be undermined. It was time to create new standards. “What they care about is the
continuation of white supremacy, so that white liberals who are with you in principle will move out when
you move in.”
Baldwin on race is Baldwin on the white American psyche. He thought a lot about white men. He wants to
understand even as he condemns. He consistently attacked them for longing for innocence, for their
refusal to grow up, but it was he who seemed the innocent in his demand that America atone, or pay its
dues, as he liked to say. The difficulty was not so much that white Americans were unable to admit that
genocide—the Middle Passage, the Indian Wars—was an integral part of American history, it was that
acceptance of the historical truth was not likely to alter anything, which left Baldwin reiterating and
restating his demand for justice down through the years. He won’t give up; America, he believed, was
sustaining too much suffering at home and abroad in its willful ignorance of its own and Western history.
Into the 1970s, he was called upon to lend his name, to speak for international political causes in
London or Berkeley, challenging his audiences to be better people. His speeches and open letters are time
capsules in their rhetoric. Even the ones from his most angry moments aren’t like a militant’s words for
black people, to which the white liberal press can listen in. Baldwin assumed an integrated audience.
What damaged his tone was that he decided that white people needed things explained on a basic level.
Often he sounded like he was scolding a Sunday school classroom.
Not all of the work in The Cross of Redemption is political: we get considered essays on jazz (“This
music begins on the auction block”), on the uses of the blues, on the debate about Black English, on mass
culture as a reflection of American chaos, on the untruthfulness of American plays and the consequent
“nerve-wracking busyness” of the American stage—which spent huge amounts of skill and energy attempting
to “justify our fantasies, thus locking us within them.” There are some forewords and afterwords to books
about black America, profiles of the Patterson-Liston fight in Chicago in 1963 and of Sidney Poitier in
1968 as well as a spirited defense of Lorraine Hansberry’s best-known work, A Raisin in the Sun. In the
pieces on culture, The Cross of Redemption becomes an absorbing portrait of Baldwin’s times—and of him.
In Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin rejected Shakespeare and Chartres Cathedral as symbols of a culture in
which he had no part. In “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” originally published in the London Observer
in 1964 and reprinted in The Cross of Redemption, he said he’d been young and missed the point entirely,
because of a “loveless education.” He no longer considered Shakespeare one of the architects of his
oppression. “I was resenting, of course, the assault on my simplicity.” If the English language was not
his, then, he said, maybe he hadn’t learned how to use it. He finally heard Shakespeare in what he called
the “shock” of Julius Caesar. Then, too, Shakespeare’s “bawdiness” mattered to him once he realized that
bawdiness, which signified “respect for the body,” was also an element of the jazz he’d been listening to
and hoping to “translate” into his work. “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.”
Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charlie appeared on Broadway in 1964 to mixed reviews. His ambitions in drama
were as keen and misplaced as Henry James’s. He’d been Elia Kazan’s assistant at the Actor’s Studio in
the late 1940s. The Cross of Redemption includes a memoir of Geraldine Page in rehearsal for Kazan’s
production of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth and Baldwin’s generous review of Kazan’s novel,
The Arrangement, published in 1967. Kazan had testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee,
but Baldwin was loyal to him and to his memories of the days when he ran the streets of Greenwich Village
with the young Marlon Brando. One can feel his period—the Method—in his remarks on theater and in his
wanting to jazz up Shakespeare, to vouch for him as a hep cat attuned to what was happening in his
Elizabethan streets. Everyone finds in Shakespeare the Shakespeare he or she needs, but it is a surprise
how uninteresting on him Baldwin lets himself be, calling him “the last bawdy writer in the English
language.”
Also surprising are the book reviews with which Baldwin’s career began. It is not uncommon for young
writers to be tough critics as a way of making an impression. They are at the same time boasting or
making a wager with the future that they won’t make the mistakes they are grilling their elders for. The
twenty-three-year-old Baldwin is merciless to Maxim Gorky. He finds him perceptive but not profound,
observant but frequently sentimental: “Gorky does not seem capable of the definitive insight, the shock
of identification.”
Baldwin couldn’t take seriously Erskine Caldwell’s latest in 1947, The Sure Hand of God, which he called
“curious because of its effortless tone and absolute emptiness,” and regretted that a promising novel
about a repressed homosexual turned out to be boring. The Portable Russian Reader is “quite dreadfully
comprehensive” and Baldwin is so hostile to James M. Cain’s “moist, benevolent fascination” with the
tough guy that his scorn comes across as a generational repudiation of the hard-boiled style of the
1930s. Baldwin’s early reviews fit with his famous attacks on Richard Wright and the protest novel in
Notes of a Native Son. He was even more cutting about John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom
(1947). In reaching for the objectivity expected of him as “a Negro and a Negro historian,” Franklin
“becomes very nearly fatuous and persistently shallow.”
But suddenly Baldwin is talking about something he’s deeply interested in and everything is different,
charged with energy. On reading again Robert Louis Stevenson, a favorite of his childhood, he finds him
at his absolute best in Kidnapped: “All of Stevenson’s warm brutal innocence is here, the sensation of
light and air, the nervous tension, the chase, the victory.” Men were not a riddle to Stevenson; they
were fitting subjects for romance and he made them asexual, in the manner of preadolescent youth. This is
the Baldwin whose insights are lasting, the writer who in 1963 recalls that as an adolescent he
discovered from reading Dostoevsky—not the Bible—that all people are sinners, that suffering is common,
and that one’s pain is trivial except insofar as one uses it to connect with the pain of others. He can
summon the apt phrase from Henry James (“Live, live all you can. It’s a mistake not to”).
“As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” taken from The New York Times Book Review in 1962, has Baldwin talking
with authority and intensity about the sorrow of Gatsby and what the receding green light means for his
generation of novelists, and how Hemingway’s “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 For Whom the Bell
Tolls.” Faulkner, he observes, is more appalled by the crimes his forebears committed against themselves
than he is by the crimes they committed against Negroes, and Dos Passos writes of an American innocence
that must be betrayed if the nation is to grow.
Americans use language to cover the sleeper, not to wake him, Baldwin said, which was why the writer as
artist is so important. Only the artist could reveal society and help it to renew itself. It never made
sense to him to speak following Philip Rahv’s essay of “Paleface and Redface in American Literature,”
because he could not think of an American novelist in whom the two traditions were not inextricably
intertwined:
One hears, it seems to me, in the work of all American novelists, even including the mighty Henry James,
songs of the plains, the memory of a virgin continent, mysteriously despoiled, though all dreams were to
have become possible here. This did not happen. And the panic, then, to which I have referred comes out
of the fact that we are now confronting the awful question of whether or not all our dreams have failed.
How have we managed to become what we have, in fact, become? And if we are, as indeed we seem to be, so
empty and so desperate, what are we to do about it? How shall we put ourselves in touch with reality?
After she sat on a book prize committee with Baldwin, Mary McCarthy expressed her astonishment that he
had read just about everything. Her surprise would at first seem an insult, but then the literary side of
Baldwin is hardly known, compared to the eloquent spokesman for racial justice.
The Cross of Redemption has a notebook-like quality because the pieces are uneven, and in the inclusion
of interviews that have Baldwin riffing in one way, testing in another. However, Kenan’s volume suggests
more strongly than anything before what we most want in the way of a posthumous Baldwin publication: his
letters. The most intriguing selection in the book is “Letters from a Journey,” a series of letters to
his agent about a trip to Africa that he planned in 1961, but that he did not take. The series was
published in Harper’s in 1963. Baldwin starts out in Israel in September, as a gateway to Africa, but by
October he is in Istanbul, full of excuses, asking for money, full of plans, doing everything except
going to Africa:
This is one of the reasons I jumped at the Grove Press invitation [to go to Africa]: it gives me a
deadline to get out of NY. For I must say, my dear Bob—though I am perhaps excessively melancholy
today—one thing which this strange and lonely journey has made me feel even more strongly is that it’s
much better for me to try to stay out of the US as much as possible. I really do find American life
intolerable and, more than that, personally menacing. I know that I will never be able to expatriate
myself again—but I also somehow know that the incessant strain and terror—for me—of continued living
there will prove, finally, to be more than I can stand.
This, like all such decisions, is wholly private and unanswerable, probably irrevocable and probably
irrational—whatever that last word may mean. What it comes to is that I am already fearfully
menaced—within—by my vision and am under the obligation to minimize my dangers. It is one thing to try to
become articulate where you are, relatively speaking, left alone to do so and quite another to make this
attempt in a setting where the terrors of other people so corroborate your own. I think that I must
really reconcile myself to being a transatlantic commuter—and turn to my advantage, and not impossibly
the advantage of others, the fact that I am a stranger everywhere.
This is the Baldwin who has sometimes smiled out at us from the pages of his biographers, the writer
making up the fabulous figure, Jimmy Baldwin, as he goes along. A few lines in his own words from Turkey
have more fascination than Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s recent and impossibly written James Baldwin’s
Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (2009) can hope to muster. Nothing about him can compete with his own
voice. People who have read some of Baldwin’s letters—Hilton Als, one of the most perceptive critics on
Baldwin; James Campbell, his best biographer; and Caryl Phillips, a young friend of Baldwin’s in his last
years—say that they are among his best work, especially the many he wrote home to his mother during his
early days in Paris, and that it is a pity the Baldwin family has not yet published them. They might
still have perceived, as Henry James said of Emerson’s confused parishioners, that he was the prayer and
the sermon, “not in the least a secularizer, but in his own subtle insinuating way a sanctifier.”
F.W. Dupee, " James Baldwin and the 'Man,' " The New York Review , February 1, 1963. ↩
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