Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin by James Campbell

Author:James Campbell [Campbell, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Literary Criticism, American, African American, history, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, African American & Black, Social Science, Privacy & Surveillance
ISBN: 9780520381681
Google: goYOEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2021-02-23T00:19:24.193523+00:00

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, don’t you see?

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, don’t you see?

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time.

Better get a home in dat rock, don’t you see?

Not everyone was persuaded of its greatness as a work of art, however, nor even as a polemic. Once the rhetorical finery had faded, what was left seemed to some rather thin and, where actual ideas were concerned, poverty-stricken. Writing in the New York Review of Books, F. W. Dupee criticized the lack of “homework” in Baldwin’s study of the Black Muslim movement’s aims and finances, and disliked the overall randomness of the ideas. Robert Coles, in Partisan Review, placed a large question mark over his panacea, love. Another critic, Marcus Klein, concluded that Baldwin’s essays were “evasive” and lacking in “ideational development,” indulging instead “Edenic fantasies.”

A more friendly attempt to point out a flaw in the philosophy came in a personal letter from the social philosopher Hannah Arendt: what “frightened” her, she wrote, was the gospel of love which Baldwin began to preach at the end of the essay. “In politics, love is a stranger,” she told him,

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