I was critical of his early work. He never forgave me. Yet he was also critical of that work, which he admitted was influenced by a downtown white aesthetic. “You notice the preoccupation with death, suicide, in the early works,” he wrote in Black Magic about his first two books, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) and The Dead Lecturer (1964). “Always my own, caught up in the deathurge of this twisted society. The work a cloud of abstraction and disjointedness, that was just whiteness. European influence, etc., just as the concept of hopelessness and despair, from the dead minds the dying morality of Europe.”
I never saw Baraka at Umbra meetings, though I went weekly, but he later wrote that the workshop was the cradle of the Black Arts movement in New York. If the poetry later gathered in Touré’s collection Dawnsong! was the manifesto of Black Arts, urging the use of African kingdoms of the past, especially Egypt, as sources of poetic inspiration, the afterword to the 1968 anthology Black Fire—edited by Baraka and Neal, the philosopher of the movement—states its aims.
There Neal called for independent literature, free of white patrons. “The so-called Harlem Renaissance was, for the most part, a fantasy-era for most black writers and their white friends,” he wrote. “For the people of the community, it never even existed. It was a thing apart.”Whereas many writers of the Harlem Renaissance (with exceptions like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston) wrote in a lofty diction and fiction writers of the 1950s used Hemingway, Faulkner, and Henry James as models, Black Fire repudiated what the poet Etheridge Knight called “the white aesthetic” in favor of Black English. Echoing the Harlem Renaissance writers who called themselves “the New Negro,” Neal spoke for “the New Breed.”
Neal wrote that people saw James Baldwin as “another form of entertainment.” Having taught Baldwin’s books, I can offer that most of his fans haven’t read them but only know him from his televised debates and comments. Baldwin has the edge over his current imitators because he worked with the Actors Studio. It was such a bad experience that he satirized Lee Strasberg in his novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968)—an insult over which the New York “Family” ostracized him. After Richard Wright used his influence to get Baldwin a fellowship, Baldwin criticized Wright under the direction of William Phillips, the coeditor of Partisan Review. (An anti-Stalinist, Phillips disagreed with the Chicago left Wright represented, which had proletariat leanings.) In his famous encounter with Wright in Paris, related by Chester Himes, Baldwin said that “the sons must slay their fathers.” That kind of literary parricide and matricide still seems to be taking place in New York.