The First Reviews of Every James Baldwin Novel / Book Marks September 17, 2018

James Baldwin is widely considered to be one of the finest writers and public intellectuals this country has ever produced. A brilliant novelist, essayist, and social critic, his explorations of homosexuality, racism, and class struggle in America have had a profound influence on the work of a generation of socially conscious authors, as well as countless readers and contemporary civil rights activists. Though perhaps best known for his essays on the black experience in America, Baldwin was also an accomplished fiction writer who penned six novels, including the hugely influential Giovanni’s Room (1956)—which was groundbreaking in its complex and nuanced depiction of same-sex desire—and the Harlem-set love story (recently been adapted for the screen by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins) If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). As 2018 marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Baldwin’s debut, we thought we’d take a look back at the first reviews of each of his novels. Not all of the initial reviews were positive (a very cranky-sounding Mario Puzo absolutely hated Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, and Darryl Pinckney—who edited the 2015 Library of America collection of Baldwin’s later novels and has written beautifully about what Baldwin meant to him—was, as a young reviewer, unimpressed with what he saw as the sentimentality and forced polemical tone in Just Above My Head), but together they offer a fascinating window into the critical conversation happening around Baldwin’s fiction over the course of a quarter century.

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Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

John’s heart was hardened against the Lord.
His father was God’s minister, the ambassador of the King of Heaven,
and John could not bow before the throne of grace without first kneeling to his father.

“This book is about pietism in Harlem and, of the three sorts of novel (string, wind and percussion), it belongs to the first. It does not produce its story as an accumulation of shocks (as most novels of Negro life do), or by puffing into a rigid metaphysical system (as most novels about religion do); it makes its utterance by tension and friction.
The organizing event of the book is a 14-year-old boy’s first religious experience. This experience is a fit, a brutal, unexpected seizure: for poor little John Grimes is the son, or thinks he is, of a deacon in one of the stomping, moaning, falling sects that ululate in converted stores around Harlem, the metropolis of grief. As a matter of fact, John and his real father had never known of each other’s existence; Gabriel Grimes, a preaching widower up from the South, hard, without laughter, with a touch of the Messianic in his nature and a good deal of the trapped animal, had armed John’s mother and accepted John in explanation of his own carnal sins.
While John is in the holy spasm, Mr. Baldwin (who has really unusual substantive powers but conventional ingenuity in form) passes through three generations to find the antecedents of that hour. He has a curious attitude toward religion. He respects it. He does not find it comical, or anthropological, or pathetic. At his most grotesque, he will still have us know it in its own terms.
It is easy to explain. When the slaves, bred like animals and denied an equity in their own lives, were sent forth into monogamy, civil existence and the labor market, they received both freedom and the Law in the same instant. They then had the need of religion. In the religion that was most available (a vulgar export-model Puritanism) the notion of sin was central and fearfully inclusive. It included all but the most joyless releases of human needs. Guilt, guilt, guilt chimes through the book. Gabriel is guilty. His first wife Deborah is guilty, though she was the victim of rape. His second wife Elizabeth is guilty, though she loved much. Guilt is visited on his children. Hypocrisy will not sweeten the tragic dissonance. And guilt could not be removed, not by everyday contrition or penance—only by being born again altogether, as in baptism, but with huge pangs and convulsions. So it is writhing on the floor of ‘The Temple of the Fire Baptized’ that John is saved.
Judicious men in their chairs may explain the sociology of guilt, and so explain Negro religion away. Mr. Baldwin will not have it away. In this beautiful, furious first novel, there are no such reductions.”

–Donald Barr, The New York Times, May 17, 1953

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Giovanni’s Room (1956)

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

“Whoever has read James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, or his collection of essays and sketches, Notes of a Native Son, knows him to be one of our gifted young writers. His most conspicuous gift is his ability to find words that astonish the reader with their boldness even as they overwhelm him with their rightness. ... [mehr] https://bookmarks.reviews/the-first-reviews-of-every-james-baldwin-novel/