Loss to the World

The insensitive creatures of a sometimes cruel world apply blunt instruments against small people and unattractive people and homosexual people and black people. James Baldwin was small, with protuberant eyes; he was homosexual and he was black. And he wrote about his encounters with the world: powerful novels such as “Another Country”; streetwise plays such as “The Amen Corner,” and, most upsetting of all, raging prose such as “The Fire Next Time.”

Anger at simple bigots spilled onto his pages. So did more complicated fury at polite white society--his target as well as his audience. The worst Baldwin work, at the level of a scream, could be criticized as intemperate, allowing white readers to feel less responsible for what polite society had done to black Americans. The best Baldwin work, poetic as well as polemic, made readers feel miserable, because his language forced them to appreciate exactly what was so cruel about the chasm between black and white in a supposedly free society. All Baldwin work approached eloquence--more literary than Malcolm X, more intellectual than Martin Luther King. Because he spoke the language of the elite, no black figure of the ‘60s so disturbed the elite--or had so much influence. Baldwin said that writers, black and white, had two options: “to be immoral and uphold the status quo or to be moral and try to change the world.”

Small, bug-eyed James Baldwin maintained a smiling presence in those days, as if anger had been left at the printers. He also had a beautiful speaking voice, as the best poets do. But by the ‘70s he was gone, an expatriate in France, because he no longer had the optimism or the patience to sustain that presence here. His self-exile was an American loss; his death Tuesday--of cancer, at age 63--is a world loss.