Contemporary Literary Criticism | Baldwin, James (Vol. 17) - COLIN MacINNES

COLIN MacINNES

I envy whoever writes of James Baldwin a century from now. That his work will then be discussed I have no doubt, since of all writers in English of our era his style is most classic, his theme one of the most relevant. But it is because of this theme, precisely, that it is so hard to criticize his writing now.

Baldwin's essential theme is life-death-passion-honor-beauty-horror … the perpetual theme since the Greeks and long before, the only one worthy of a great artist and of which, as writer and man, he has proved himself so worthy. (p. 119)

[Baldwin] is a premonitory prophet, a fallible sage, a sooth-sayer, a bardic voice falling on deaf and delighted ears. These qualities emerge best in his "essays" (for such one must call them, though they are so agonized and hortatory that the word hardly fits), and far less decisively in his novels. If I say I do not think his novels convey his intentions so effectively—if I say in fact that he...

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