Cleaver/Baldwin Revisited: Naturalism and the Gendering of Black Revolution

Literary naturalism has played a fundamental role in shaping discussions of the sociopolitical responsibilities of black writing. In African-American literary history, conventions of naturalist political protest have been most frequently associated with the work of Richard Wright, and dissent from those conventions associated with James Baldwin. In "Everybody's Protest Novel" (1949) and "Many Thousands Gone" (1951), Baldwin indicted what he saw as Wright's reductive depiction of black life lived at the mercy of structural forces and characterized by violence, individual isolation, and cultural impoverishment. By deploying the assumptions and décor of naturalism—gritty urban settings, determining environmental and political forces, and a male protagonist deformed by those forces—Wright reinforces white America's at-best condescending and at-worst racist misperception that "Negro life is in fact as debased and impoverished as our theology claims" ("Many" 41).

Eldridge Cleaver, the veteran of the California prison system who went on to become a Black Panther Party leader, praised Wright while denigrating Baldwin in the notorious essay "Notes on a Native Son," included in his 1968 prison memoir and essay collection Soul on Ice. The revolutionary value of Wright's work, Cleaver writes, derives both from Wright's clear understanding of black masculinity's uncompromising resistance to a "totalitarian white world" and his espousal of naturalist tenets. "Of all black American novelists, and indeed of all American novelists of any hue, Richard Wright reigns supreme for his profound political, economic, and social reference. Wright had the ability, like Dreiser, of harnessing the gigantic, overwhelming environmental forces and focusing them . . . on individuals and their acts." By contrast, Cleaver sees Baldwin's homosexuality as a perversely weak, racially inauthentic masculinity that is part and parcel of a fawning love of whites and white culture. That love of whiteness accompanies Baldwin's refusal of naturalism's "social reference": "His characters all seem to be fucking and sucking in a vacuum" (132, 134-35). Recent critical work that situates Baldwin as both a queer and black writer can be read as a response to the argument typified by Cleaver: that homosexuality is a literary, political, and racial betrayal of blackness.¹

Multiple critics lament what they see as a chastened response to Cleaver in Baldwin's late 1960s and 1970s work, in which Baldwin adopted a radical skepticism toward America and the chances of interracial harmony and espoused the Black Power movement and radical black nationalism rather than the reformism of mainstream Civil Rights politics. Douglas Field and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. posit that Baldwin's shift in this period can be attributed to Cleaver particularly and to the homophobic, heteropatriarchal rhetoric of black nationalism more generally. Field writes that Cleaver's essay had a "profound effect" on Baldwin, who responded to black radicals like Cleaver by becoming "taciturn about the subject of homosexuality" and writing in "a new radical rhetoric that sounded borrowed and unsure in Baldwin's pen" (465-67). Gates sees Cleaver as representative of "a newly sexualized black nationalism that could stigmatize homosexuality as a capitulation to alien white norms, and correspondingly accredit homophobia . . . as a progressive political act." Cowed by this revolutionary appropriation of homophobia, Baldwin "responded with a pose of wounded passivity" and "borrowed the populist slogans of the day." In place of his earlier emphases on interracial love and humanism, the ascendency of Black Power "forced Baldwin to simplify his rhetoric" to terms of black separatism and hatred of whites (12-13).

Baldwin's political shift was accompanied by a turn toward fiction that resembled the literary naturalism he was famous for critiquing. If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) deals with an urban, politically conscious black family struggling against the forces of white racism, police oppression, and state power. Beale Street is also atypical for Baldwin in that it features no interracial or homosexual relationships and offers a glowing depiction of a patriarchal black family. It seems to conform to black nationalist discourse in celebrating a heteropatriarchal mode of black masculinity. Keith Clark describes it as "a paean to anachronistic constructions of black manhood" (58), and he, Douglas Field...