James Baldwin: America and Beyond

6. Rendezvous with Life. Reading Early and Late Baldwin

 six Rendezvous with Life Reading Early and Late Baldwin robert reid-pharr Stomp my feet An’ clap my han’s Angels comin’ To dese fair lan’s. Cut my lover Off dat tree! Angels comin’ To set me free. Glory, glory, To de Lamb Blessed Jesus Where’s my man? Black girl, whirl Your torn, red dress Black girl, hide Your bitterness. Black girl stretch Your mouth so wide. None will guess The way he died Turned your heart To quivering mud While your lover’s Soft, red blood 126 Stained the scowling Outraged tree. Angels come To cut him free! —james baldwin, “black girl shouting” James Baldwin was a bad poet, or so it is generally held within the settled and static critical and biographical traditions that bunch around Baldwin’s in‹nitely interesting ‹gure. He was a bad poet; a remarkable, if not always reliable, novelist; a talented orator; a forthright partisan of the Black American civil rights struggle; a breathtakingly interesting American exile; and a profoundly talented essayist. For many these are established facts, the clearly and incontrovertibly “known” truth about this most signi‹cant of twentieth-century Black American writers. That is to say, as a subject established within the practice of literary and cultural criticism, James Baldwin , the many attestations to his vibrancy notwithstanding, is, it seems, shockingly, surprisingly, frustratingly dead. What I hope to demonstrate and to work against in this essay then is a tendency toward ossi‹cation (mummi‹cation, one is wont to say) within the critical and biographical narratives that surround Baldwin and his work, narratives that structure not only which parts of Baldwin’s corpus are deemed to be worth consideration (novels and essays are “in” while plays and poems are “out”) but also which epochs within Baldwin’s career it is imagined one might fruitfully approach.1 That I begin these comments with consideration of a poem that a precocious teenaged Baldwin published in the winter 1942 issue of the Magpie , the literary magazine of the Bronx high school that Baldwin attended, bespeaks, I hope, a desire to resuscitate devalued forms and underappreciated periods within Baldwin’s oeuvre. At the same time, however, I must rush to say that, though I agree that there is considerable value in underappreciated parts of Baldwin’s corpus, I am most concerned in these comments to focus as closely as I can on the discursive and ideological structures underwriting the ongoing process of Baldwin’s valuation, institutionalization, and canonization. Thus my interest in this earliest poem by Baldwin (a work that with its predictable images, improbable dialect , and strained changes of diction and voice suggests that perhaps BaldRendezvous with Life 127 win was not so off the mark when he disparaged his own efforts as a poet) turns on my belief that it is precisely within undervalued precincts that one might most easily discern basic social, aesthetic, and ideological structure. Moreover, much the same can be said of the other work that we will examine in these pages, Baldwin’s almost universally disparaged long essay The Evidence of Things Not Seen, a work predictably published at the end of a masterful, if presumably declining, career. I am attracted to these texts precisely because they represent “failures” for Baldwin—though I stress again that my point is not to enter into what I take to be an overwrought concern with when, where, or how to assign value. Or perhaps to state the matter a bit more clearly, I ‹nd these works interesting precisely because they seem for many of us to be beyond the pale, (critically/aesthetically) inert. Indeed, I have gone so far as to attempt to provoke my readers by associating the process of Baldwin’s canonization with the author’s ‹gurative death not to resuscitate Roland Barthes’s now decades-old call for a necessary distinction between the critical and the biographical, but instead in order to remark my concern that the ossi‹cation of critical conceit regarding Baldwin and his work speaks less to innate quality than to only half-articulate attempts within our critical literatures and practices to place not so much Baldwin as Baldwin studies in service to speci‹c class interests.2 Perhaps I overstep myself then when I speak of the death of Baldwin. Instead it might be more precise to argue that the process of canonization in which many of us, myself included...