Evidently the essay is to be taken as only a partial or provisional declaration on Baldwin’s part, a single piece of his mind. It is called “Down At the Cross Letter From a Region of My Mind.” The subtitle should be noted. The other, much longer, much more significant essay appeared first in a pre-Christmas number of The New Yorker, where it made, understandably, a sensation. The essay reads like some specimen of “public speech” as practiced by MacLeish or Norman Corwin. Between the hundred-year-old anniversary and the fifteen-year-old nephew the disparity is too great even for a writer of Baldwin’s rhetorical powers. One is a brief affair entitled “My Dungeon Shook” and addressed to “My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.” The ominous promise of this title is fulfilled in the text.
The Fire Next Time gets its title from a slave song: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign,/No more water the fire next time.” But this small book with the incendiary title consists of two independent essays, both in the form of letters. Its subjects are less concrete, less clearly defined to a considerable extent he has exchanged prophecy for criticism, exhortation for analysis, and the results for his mind and style are in part disturbing. His latest book, The Fire Next Time, differs in important ways from his earlier work in the essay. This former Harlem boy has undergone his own incredible metamorphosis. It suggests the ideal prose of an ideal literary community, some aristocratic France of one’s dreams. Nobody else in democratic America writes sentences like this anymore. Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices. For instance this one, from The Fire Next Time: He is in love, for example, with syntax, with sentences that mount through clearly articulated stages to a resounding and clarifying climax and then gracefully subside. It is, as I have said, that of a highly stylized Negro, a role which he plays with an artful and zestful consistency and which he expresses in a language distinguished by clarity, brevity, and a certain formal elegance. But Baldwin’s point of view in his essays is not merely that of the generic Negro. Of course the transfiguring process in Baldwin’s essays owes something to the fact that the point of view is a Negro’s, an outsider’s, just as the satire of American manners in Lolita and Morte d’Urban depends on their being written from the angle of, respectively, a foreign-born creep and a Catholic priest. Similarly with those routine themes, the Paris expatriate and Life With Father, which he treats in “Equal In Paris” and the title piece of Notes of a Native Son, and which he wholly transfigures. To apply criticism “in depth” to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is, for him, to illuminate not only a book, an author, an age, but a whole strain in a country’s culture. But Baldwin’s way with them is far from inevitable. And their subjects-a book, a person, a locale, an encounter-are the inevitable subjects of magazine essays. Most of them were written, as other such pieces generally are, for the magazines, some obviously on assignment. His major essays-for example, those collected in Notes of a Native Son-show the extent to which he is able to be different and in his own way better. He will be different and in his own way be better. Believing himself to have been branded as different from and inferior to the white majority, he will make a virtue of his situation.
And like her he converts this thing, in itself so absurdly material, into a form of consciousness, a condition of spirit. So he wears his color as Hester Prynne did her scarlet letter, proudly. For he appears to have received a heavy dose of existentialism he is at least half-inclined to see the Negro question in the light of the Human Condition. His role is that of the man whose complexion constitutes his fate, and not only in a society poisoned by prejudice but, it sometimes seems, in general. Baldwin impresses me as being the Negro in extremis, a virtuoso of ethnic suffering, defiance, and aspiration. The literary role he has taken on so deliberately and played with so agile an intelligence is one that no white writer could possibly imitate and that few Negroes, I imagine, would wish to embrace in toto. He probably has, in fact, no real competitors. As a writer of polemical essays on the Negro question James Baldwin has no equals.
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