SOURCE: "The Twin Urges of James Baldwin," in The Good Word & Other Words, 1978, pp. 194-200.

[In the following essay, which was published in 1977 in Commonweal, Sheed complains that the tone of Baldwin's The Devil Finds Work sounds false and that the subject of movies does not support the book's religious undertone.]

When James Baldwin goes wrong (as he has taken to doing lately), it usually seems less a failure of talent than of policy. Of all our writers he is one of the most calculating. Living his life on several borderlines, he has learned to watch his step: driven at the same time by an urge to please and a mission to scold.

In his early days, the twin urges came together to make very good policy indeed. White liberals craved a spanking and they got a good one. But then too many amateurs joined in the fun, all the Raps and Stokelys and Seales, until even liberal guilt gave out. And now the times seem to call for something a little different. The Devil Finds Work shows Baldwin groping for it—not just because he's a hustler, at least as writers go, but because he has a genuine quasi-religious vocation. In the last pages he richly describes a church ceremony he went through as a boy, akin to attaining the last mansions of mysticism: and you have to do something after that. Your work, even your atheism, will always taste of religion.

And this is the first problem we come across in the new book. Because the subject is movies, and most movies simply do not accommodate such religious passion. So his tone sounds false. He may or may not feel that strongly about movies (it's hard to believe), but sincerity isn't the issue. A preacher doesn't have to feel what he says every Sunday: rhetoric is an art, and Baldwin practices it very professionally. But the sermon's subject must be at least in the same ball park as the style, or you get bathos, the sermon that fails to rise.

Since Baldwin is too intelligent not to notice this, we get an uneasy compromise between old habits and new possibilities. The folks pays him to preach (to use his own self-mocking language), so he turns it on mechanically, almost absentmindedly, lapsing at times into incoherence, as if he's fallen asleep at the microphone. But since getting mad at the movies is only one step removed from getting mad at the funnies, he escapes periodically in two directions, one bad and one good.

The bad one is to change the subject outrageously in order to raise the emotional ante: thus there are several references to how white people like to burn babies that totally stumped me. A prophet should disturb all levels of opinion and must therefore be something of a precisionist. But this stuff passes harmlessly overhead. Blacks have been known to kill babies too, in Biafra and elsewhere, but nobody said they like it. People apt to be reading Baldwin at all have long since graduated from this level of rant. He may write for the masses, but he is read by the intelligentsia.

But his second escape at times almost makes up for the first: which is simply to talk about movies according to their kind, with amusement, irony, and his own quirky insights. More writers should do this: we were raised as much in the movie house as the library, and it's pretentious to go on blaming it all on Joyce. In Baldwin's case a movie case history is doubly valuable because his angle is so solitary, shaped by no gang and deflected by no interpretation, and shared only with a white woman teacher, herself a solitary. Nobody ever saw these movies quite the way he did, or ever will.

Unfortunately the childhood section is tantalizingly short, and the adult's voice horns in too often, but some fine things come through: in particular the way the young Baldwin had to convert certain white actors into blacks, even as white basketball fans reverse the process today, in order to identify. Thus, Henry Fonda's walk made him black, and Joan Crawford's resemblance to a woman in the local grocery store made her black, while Bette Davis's popping eyes made her not only black but practically Jimmy himself.

This is vintage Baldwin: and if he lacks confidence in his softer notes he shouldn't (his sentimental notes are another matter). He does not automatically have to lecture us on every topic he writes about. In this more urbane mode, his racial intrusions often make good sense. For instance, in checking A Tale of Two Cities against what he has learned in the streets he perhaps inadvertently suggests to this reader, at least, how Dickens might have veered away from what he had learned in the streets. In fact, Baldwin's whole treatment of this story suggests a potential literary critic, if he'd calm down for a minute.

This section ends with a valuable addition to Baldwin's early autobiography: a corpus to which one had thought no further additions were possible. He discovers the theater and loses his religion almost at the same moment. The reality of stage actors playing Macbeth is enough to blow away even that encounter with the Holy Ghost. And as if to symbolize this, he literally tiptoes out of church one Sunday and heads downtown for a show: taking, as he says in another context, his church with him.

If stage acting could transplant God, it utterly demolished screen acting for him. "Canada Lee [in Native Son] was Bigger Thomas, but he was also Canada Lee: his physical presence, like the physical presence of Paul Robeson, gave me the right to live. He was not at the mercy of my imagination as he would have been, on the screen: he was on the stage, in flesh and blood, and I was, therefore, at the mercy of his imagination." If you're raised an incarnational Christian (and it's hard to image another kind), flesh and blood can easily become food and drink to you. Henceforth in even the silliest play, the actors' presence would thrust reality through at Baldwin; conversely, only the greatest of actors could insert physicality into a movie, and that fleetingly.

His own course was set. Embodied reality, thick, hot, and tangible, is Baldwin's grail, even jerking him loose from his own rhetoric. So he became a man of the stage, dealing with real people and not their images; and he wrote some of his best work for it—including my own favorite, The Amen Corner, in which he uses the stage to exorcise the Church once and for all. Only to come out more religious than ever—only at random now, passionately foraging for Good and Evil in race, in sex, even in Norman Mailer.

Perhaps, then, not the ideal man to write about movies. The magic element which is their particular genius is precisely what maddens his fundamentalist soul the most. Like Pascal at the real theater, he sees nothing but lies up there. Although he seems to know something about the craft of movies, it doesn't interest or charm him in the least. His book has no pictures, which is unusual in a film book, but quite appropriate for this one. Because even the stills would be lies.

Specifically lies about race. And here we have a right to expect the latest news from Baldwin and not a rehash. I assume he is still a black spokesman in good standing. Although his book is disarmingly datelined from France, which is nearer the pied-noir country, there must be a victims' network of information which keeps him up to date. But his personal witness, his strength, has begun to sound tentative. He talks of being terrorized in some Southern town, but he can't remember what year or, apparently, the distinction between one town and another. "It is hard to be accurate concerning the pace of my country's progress." Very hard from St. Paul de Vence. We can get fresher testimony than that every day of the week.

Anyhow for Baldwin there is still just something called the South, unchanging and indivisible, and the liberals down there might as well pack up shop. It's a bleak picture and if Baldwin sees any lift in the clouds he either isn't telling or he rejects it as a dangerous illusion, an invitation to drop one's guard. For instance, in the dopey film In the Heat of the Night, there is a scene where the white sheriff humbles himself to carry Sidney Poitier's bags, and Baldwin sees for a moment something "choked and moving" in this, only to round on it sternly as a dangerous daydream. "White Americans have been encouraged to keep on dreaming, and black Americans have been alerted to the necessity of waking up."

So paranoia, as before, is his message to blacks, and a white reviewer is in no position to question it. Since no improvement is to be trusted, the implicit solution is revolution, and Baldwin talks airily of seizing property as if this were still the slaphappy sixties when all seemed possible. For the moment, revolutionary rant seems as remote as the evangelism that used to pacify blacks: but again, Baldwin isn't quite calling for it, only toying with it. His new position is still very much in the works.

Meanwhile, offscreen, geographical distance may have obscured some of the social nuances Baldwin usually pounces on so swiftly and surely. He talks, for instance, of whites being terrified of blacks, and blacks being enraged by whites, as if this blanketed the case. But one of the odd things that happened in the sixties was that the blacks became largely de-mystified, for better or worse. By accepting such drugstore rebels as Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael at their own valuation, we let ourselves in for one of the greatest letdowns in memory. The black enigma was transformed overnight into the black chatterbox. Although, as Claude Brown once said privately, these men could not have rounded up ten followers in Harlem, they told us they were leaders, so we took them for leaders. And we were relieved to find they were not the brooding giants that Baldwin had conjured, but just average publicity hounds.

Because of this comical misunderstanding, many whites ceased being impressed by blacks altogether, except such as carried knives, and a new psychic alignment occurred that Baldwin should come home and tell us about. The problem now is not so much fear as deepening indifference. Baldwin still writes as though our souls were so hag-ridden by race that even our innocent entertainments reflect it. And he gives us the old castration folderol as if it were piping hot. But the news I hear is different. Many whites now go for years without thinking about blacks at all. The invisible man has returned. And as de facto segregation continues to settle like mold, his future seems assured.

On the black side of the fence, one simply has to take him on trust. Young blacks today seem more confident than Baldwin's prototypes but it might only take a few full-time bigots plus some ad hoc recruits—as in South Boston—to chip the paint off this. What one can question, by the current division of racist labor, is his account of the white psyche. Because here again he simply says nothing that a contemporary reader can use. His white men sound at times exactly like Susan Brownmiller's rapists, whom that author also transformed into Everyman, and in fact like all the hyperaggressive bullies you've ever met: and these surely come in all colors.

Of such movies as Death Wish or Straw Dogs or the worst of Clint Eastwood (if such there be) or black exploitation films—in short all the movies that validate bullying on one side or another and make it chic—he says nothing except, tantalizingly, of the latter that they "make black experience irrelevant and obsolete" (his own, or everyone's?). If by chance he has not seen the others, in particular Death Wish, the mugger-killing wet dream, he has wandered unarmed into the one subject Americans really know about.

Baldwin's weakness as a prophet is to suppose that the rest of us experience life as intensely as he does; and his strength is roughly the same. If his overall sociology is suspect right now, his ability to enlarge a small emotion so that we can all see it is not. And this perhaps rescues him even as a writer about movies.

Throughout, his eyes swarm greedily over the screen, scavenging for small truths. And although brotherhood epics like In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner were flailed insensible by white critics, leaving precious little to pick on, in each case he finds some scene or other even richer in phoniness, or closer to truth, than we suspected. For instance, in the latter film, he has a passage on a successful black son's relation to his father that probably no one else would have thought of. While for the former, he provides such a droll plot summary that the absurdity jumps a dimension.

He is also good on The Defiant Ones and Lawrence of Arabia though here one senses that he is not saying all he knows. He talks at one point of the seismographic shudder Americans experience at the word "homosexual," but he handles it pretty much like a hot potato himself: talking around and around it without quite landing on it. Again this is policy (the word homosexual does go off like a fire alarm. reminding us to put up our dukes) but in this case, I think, too much policy. When Baldwin holds back something it distorts his whole manner. The attempt to seduce is too slick. And this, just as much as his compulsion to preach when there's nothing to preach about, diverts him from his real lover, truth. He is not seeing those movies as an average black man, but as a unique exile, and the pose is beginning to wear thin.

So, the tension remains. He has been away a long time and I'm sure he has a story to tell about that, perhaps his best one yet. It is hard to believe that in Paris and Istanbul his mind was really on American movies: but they might have been something in the attic that he wanted to get rid of. And the attempt is worthwhile if only for the sake of some sprightly lines, to wit, "J. Edgar Hoover, history's most highly paid (and most utterly useless) voyeur," and random bangs and flashes. He even talks several times of human weakness (as opposed to white weakness)—including his own: which suggests that the hanging judge may be ready to come down from his perch and mix it with us.

But for now he remains up there wagging his finger sternly at the converted and the bored. And with so many clergymen, he too often deduces Reality solely by intelligence in this book, and while he has more than enough of that quality, it tends to fly off in bootless directions unless anchored by touch. He is right to love the stage. His art needs real bodies. But anyone who sees reality as clearly as Baldwin does must be tempted at times to run like the wind; and perhaps, for just a little while, he's done that. After all, that's what movies are for—even for those preachers who denounce them the loudest.