2 - Canonizing James Baldwin: 1974–87

Summary

BY 1974, THE FIFTY-YEAR-OLD BALDWIN had published four collections of essays, four novels, two plays, an unfilmed screenplay, two booklength dialogues, a collection of short stories, and numerous uncollected articles, reviews, and interviews. He had also purchased the estate at St. Paul-de-Vence, France, that would become his home. While he continued to travel between the United States and Europe (referring to himself as a transatlantic commuter), from 1971 on, his stays in the United States were shorter and less frequent. And though he continued to be an active writer and was in fact quite prolific until his death in 1987, he was no longer a prominent public face. His picture doesn't appear on the cover of magazines. Though he worked diligently alongside many civil rights leaders and was, for many, the movement's moral center, he is left out of civil rights histories.

In 1973 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., future director of the W. E. B. Dubois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, but then a Cambridge University graduate student and Time correspondent, planned an article on black expatriates. In August of that year he dined with Baldwin, Josephine Baker, and several others at Baldwin's French estate. While that evening would inspire Baldwin to write The Welcome Table, a play he completed just before his death, Time declined to publish Gates's interview, calling Baldwin “passé” (Leeming, 320). Baldwin had ceased to be America's brightest African American literary star.

This chapter considers the critical reception of Baldwin's work from 1974 to the year of his death, 1987. The collection that begins this period, Keneth Kinnamon's James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays, the first to gather important criticism on Baldwin's work, includes the major players up to this point: Langston Hughes, Eldridge Cleaver, Irving Howe, Robert Bone, George E. Kent. Acknowledging that the final critical word had yet to be written, Kinnamon states, “Whatever the final assessment of his literary achievement, it is clear that his voice—simultaneously that of victim, witness, and prophet—has been among the most urgent of our time” (7). He also identifies trends in the “diverse critical opinions” surrounding Baldwin's work. These trends, already outlined in the previous chapter, stand as the very kind of criticism many critics of this period try to get away from.