Baldwin’s biographer, David Leeming, told me that many of the civil-rights leaders didn’t want to be associated with Baldwin, because he was so openly gay; it seems to have been why the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington pointedly ignored him. In the end, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver were reincarnations of his withholding and judgmental preacher father.
By the time the Black Power movement had started to ebb, Baldwin was adrift not only politically but aesthetically. Throughout the nineteen-seventies, Styron and Mailer were working on ambitious books like “Sophie’s Choice” and “The Executioner’s Song,” Thomas Pynchon was breaking new ground with “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and a prolific new generation of black women—Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison—was claiming the public’s imagination. Baldwin’s fastidious thought process and his baroque sentences suddenly seemed hopelessly outdated, at once self-aggrandizing and ingratiating. Nevertheless, up until his death, in 1987, at the age of sixty-three, Baldwin continued to harbor the hope that he would be embraced as an important literary figure by the army of his desire: the black men who had forsaken him.
What became clear to me as I reread Baldwin’s work (the Library of America selection mercifully excludes his ill-conceived and poorly written plays, “The Amen Corner” and “Blues for Mister Charlie,” and the novels written after “Another Country”) is that he never possessed a novelist’s imagination or sense of structure—or, indeed, a novelist’s interest in the lives of other people. Nor was he a reporter: most of his reporting pieces were stiff and banal. He was at his best when he was writing about some aspect of life or politics that reflected his interior self: he contained a multitude of worlds, and those worlds were his true subject.
But I also realized that my acute awareness of Baldwin’s weaknesses as a writer stemmed from my sense of kinship with him. Certainly Baldwin understood this particular kind of ambivalence, having written the following at thirty-six, the age I am now:
One of my dearest friends, a Negro writer now living in Spain, circled around me and I around him for months before we spoke. One Negro meeting another at an all-white cocktail party . . . cannot but wonder how the other got there. The question is: Is he for real? Or is he kissing ass? . . . Negroes know about each other what can here be called family secrets, and this means that one Negro, if he wishes, can “knock” the other’s “hustle.” . . . Therefore, one “exceptional” Negro watches another “exceptional” Negro in order to find out if he knows how vastly successful and bitterly funny the hoax has been.