Baldwin, James (Vol. 13) | Alfred Kazin
ALFRED KAZIN
As a writer Baldwin is as obsessed by sex and family as Strindberg was, but instead of using situations for their dramatic value, Baldwin likes to pile up all possible emotional conflicts as assertions. But for the same reason that in Giovanni's Room Baldwin made everybody white just to show that he could, and in Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone transferred the son-father quarrel to a quarrel with a brother, so one feels about Another Country that Baldwin writes fiction in order to use up his private difficulties; even his fiction piles up the atmosphere of raw emotion that is his literary standby. Why does so powerful a writer as Baldwin make himself look simpleminded by merely asserting an inconsequential succession of emotions? (p. 222)
[In] Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, Baldwin dropped the complicated code for love difficulties he uses in his novels and simplified himself...
[The entire page is 389 words long]
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