In the religion that was most available (a vulgar export-model Puritanism) the notion of sin was central and fearfully inclusive. When the slaves, bred like animals and denied an equity in their own lives, were sent forth into monogamy, civil existence and the labor market, they received both freedom and the Law in the same instant. At his most grotesque, he will still have us know it in its own terms. He does not find it comical, or anthropological, or pathetic. He has a curious attitude toward religion. Baldwin (who has really unusual substantive powers but conventional ingenuity in form) passes through three generations to find the antecedents of that hour. As a matter of fact, John and his real father had never known of each other’s existence Gabriel Grimes, a preaching widower up from the South, hard, without laughter, with a touch of the Messianic in his nature and a good deal of the trapped animal, had armed John’s mother and accepted John in explanation of his own carnal sins. This experience is a fit, a brutal, unexpected seizure: for poor little John Grimes is the son, or thinks he is, of a deacon in one of the stomping, moaning, falling sects that ululate in converted stores around Harlem, the metropolis of grief. The organizing event of the book is a 14-year-old boy’s first religious experience. It does not produce its story as an accumulation of shocks (as most novels of Negro life do), or by puffing into a rigid metaphysical system (as most novels about religion do) it makes its utterance by tension and friction. “This book is about pietism in Harlem and, of the three sorts of novel (string, wind and percussion), it belongs to the first. Not all of the initial reviews were positive (a very cranky-sounding Mario Puzo absolutely hated Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, and Darryl Pinckney-who edited the 2015 Library of America collection of Baldwin’s later novels and has written beautifully about what Baldwin meant to him-was, as a young reviewer, unimpressed with what he saw as the sentimentality and forced polemical tone in Just Above My Head), but together they offer a fascinating window into the critical conversation happening around Baldwin’s fiction over the course of a quarter century. As 2018 marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Baldwin’s debut, we thought we’d take a look back at the first reviews of each of his novels. Though perhaps best known for his essays on the black experience in America, Baldwin was also an accomplished fiction writer who penned six novels, including the hugely influential Giovanni’s Room (1956)-which was groundbreaking in its complex and nuanced depiction of same-sex desire-and the Harlem-set love story (recently been adapted for the screen by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins) If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). A brilliant novelist, essayist, and social critic, his explorations of homosexuality, racism, and class struggle in America have had a profound influence on the work of a generation of socially conscious authors, as well as countless readers and contemporary civil rights activists. James Baldwin is widely considered to be one of the finest writers and public intellectuals this country has ever produced.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |