James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey

Lynn Orilla Scott. James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2002. 224 pp. $43.95.

"What in the world was I by now/' James Baldwin wondered in No Name in the Street, "but an aging, lonely, sexually dubious, politically outrageous, unspeakably erratic freak?" Published in 1972, but begun in the late 1960s, Baldwin's long essay captures many of the ambiguities and complexities that characterized his mercurial writing career and stormy personal life. In contrast to the steadfast reputations of African American writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, Baldwin's status as a novelist is less secure. Although readers and critics have been quick to praise moments of Baldwin's breathtaking, syncopated prose, his work -particularly from the mid to late 1960s-is often viewed as patchy and inconsistent. By the early 1970s, Baldwin's reputation had dwindled; his last novel of the 1960s, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, was panned by critics who saw in his writing an uneasy tension between Baldwin the celebrity and Baldwin the aging political radical. Publicly humiliated and scorned by a younger generation of black radical writers (particularly Eldridge Cleaver and Amiri Baraka), Baldwin, it seemed, never recovered.

In James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey, Lynn Orilla Scott attempts to redress the recalcitrant consensus among a wide range of Baldwin scholars (including Addison Gayle, Calvin C. Hernton, and Morris Dickstein) that Baldwin's later fiction signaled his demise as a novelist. Focusing on his last three novels (Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, IfBeale Street Could Talk, and just Above My Head), Scott examines the reasons for the critical neglect of Baldwin's later work. Central to Scott's argument is the need to examine Baldwin's later novels through the prism of his earlier...