‘On James Baldwin’
By Colm Tóibín
Brandeis University Press, 168 pages

“On James Baldwin” is not a biography or a work of literary analysis; it belongs in the category of biographical criticism, in which almost moment by moment the writers (Baldwin and Colm Tóibín) are there on the page, assessing themselves and their work. Mr. Toibin has an uncanny ability to situate himself as if he is beside Baldwin, raising questions about what Baldwin’s characters will do next, what options they seem to have, what destinies seem foreclosed to them.  

Baldwin is usually discussed in terms of his brilliant nonfiction, and though Mr. Tóibín deals with the more important essays, the novels — “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Giovanni’s Room,” and “Another Country” — are what elicit Mr. Tóibín‘s profoundest perceptions. The public Baldwin, who appeared on television and participated in civil rights marches, gets his due, but Mr. Tóibín insists that only in fiction could Baldwin access what is most private, personal, and significant about human character.

Mr. Tóibín, a former altar boy, recurs to his own experience while discussing “Go Tell It on the Mountain”: “The heightened emotion around ritual and religious belief strayed into same-sex desire, rendering the latter as unfathomable and sacred as the former, but more dangerous. I came to Baldwin’s novel with experience and desires of my own that I did not understand. I did not know that all the time I spent in the local Catholic cathedral in Enniscorthy in Ireland might lodge so tenaciously in my own memory and my imagining. I did not connect my interest in religious ritual with my own pale, hidden homosexuality.” 

In effect, Baldwin’s fiction outed Mr. Tóibín to himself, and to his own Irishness: “‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ is as much a landmark in American writing as Joyce’s collection of stories Dubliners was in Ireland.” Mr. Tóibín puts Baldwin on the same level as Joyce; he was powerfully portraying Ireland while in exile on the European continent just as Baldwin deftly depicted Black and white American lives from the vantage point of Paris.

An even closer parallel to Baldwin is Henry James, whose novels deeply influenced Baldwin’s style and his way of using a third person intimate voice to get at the lives of his characters in conflict with themselves. Mr. Tóibín’s employment of James effectively explains how Baldwin’s style speaks for more than the man himself: “By also appropriating the heritage of English prose, Baldwin was adapting and using not only a style but also system of thinking that used qualification, the aside, and subsequent subordinate clauses to suggest that the way towards truth was slippery, ambiguous, and easily undermined.”

Baldwin’s Jamesian sentences are sometimes curtailed by a curt style that Mr. Tóibín’s likens to Hemingway’s, thereby showing what a resourceful and subtle novelist Baldwin could be. On the level of language, Mr. Tóibín’s shows how a novel differs from other forms of prose. Barack Obama’s first memoir is invoked to contrast Baldwin’s “fearless self-interrogation” with Obama’s “readiness to use soft rhetoric” in order to avoid “untidy truths.” Obama’s words in his first memoir, Mr. Tóibín concludes, signaled his “slowly becoming a politician.”

There are other fascinating comparisons of Baldwin to Oscar Wilde and to African American writers. It is a mark of Mr. Tóibín’s catholicity, when speaking of Baldwin’s fiction, that he quotes Baldwin’s endorsement, “in another context,” of the freedom of the imagination, which creates “the common history ours.”

Mr. Tóibín is referring to Baldwin’s blurb for William Styron’s controversial “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” Styron was excoriated for appropriating the Black experience and the history of slavery. A whole book, “Ten Black Writers Respond,” was devoted to negating the novel. Given Mr. Tóibín’s brilliant disquisition on the importance of what the private lives of Baldwin’s characters tell us about ourselves, it is Styron’s exploration of Turner’s intimate feelings that probably impressed Baldwin, who, Mr. Tóibín reminds us, was not afraid to write a novel about white characters.

The great achievement of “On James Baldwin” is the same as what Baldwin hoped for himself: to write about the human condition without confinement to race, religion, and sexual orientation. 

Mr. Rollyson is the author of the forthcoming book, “Faulkner On and Off the Page: Essays in Biographical Criticism.”