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Baldwin's Legacy |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Herb Greer |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 10/1/1994 |
| Size: 2,765 Words, 16,806 Characters |
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JAMES BALDWIN
David Leeming
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994
464 pp., $25.00
In the face of it, the career of James Baldwin represents a relatively typical tragedy in American letters. Baldwin's case was more poignant than some others because at one point he appeared to understand the peculiarly American quirk that destroyed so many writers and other artists who have lost themselves in the swamp of public life. He expressed it like this: "American writers do not have a fixed society to describe. The only society they know is one in which nothing is fixed and in which the individual has to fight for his identity"
The effect on the successful writer is a brutal and often losing battle between the demands of his talent and the exigencies of the role he chooses to play in public. That contrast for Baldwin was unusually wide; unlike Hemingway, who was ruined late in life by a similar conflict, this black writer's real talent did not harmonize at all with the so-called prophecies he produced as a public figure. David Leeming's new biography James Baldwin urges the belief that Baldwin's principal concern was with the "inner life" of human beings. What this really means, though Leeming does not say it in so many words, is that Baldwin's greatest strength lay in his imagination. That is to say, he was better at making things up and molding fact into fiction than in dealing objectively with the venomous and protean monsters of the real world.
Baldwin, a sensitive, vulnerable, unstable, and physically frail bisexual black man who really preferred male-to-male sex, had a shaky identity. He was not equipped either by temperament or by training to ...
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... fact, one went for an early breakfast of onion soup and maybe to eat a plate of tripes a la mode de Caen.
2. Exactly as Francophone African "Negritude"--which Baldwin did reject--has its real source not in Africa but in France; it is a confected pseudo-mystical tissue of "got rhythm"-style myths based on a blend of Rousseau's noble savage and superstitions about the "dark continent."
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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