Customer Reviews

Going to Meet the Man

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4 star:		(1)
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Baldwin's ability to weave through various times throughout a story is exemplified best in "Sonny's Blues," where he alludes to Isiah with the cup of trembling, and moves through different periods of Harlem, the childhoods and young lives of the narrator and his brother, the constants, in the church and the community and the music, which tells that same story, which must be retold, again and again. The way Baldwin writes about music is virtually unparallelled. In these short stories, he manages to stay clear of the sometimes excessive sentimentality that comes out in novels like Another Country. We sympathize with everyone, we see everyone's need for love, the intense loneliness of human experience, and the individual alienation and experience that results from societal divisions of race and sexuality. The first two stories contain the same characters from his famous first novel Go Tell it on The Mountain. The biblical imagery in these stories is not always pronounced as it may be in Go Tell..., but Baldwin's command of the bible show us the fear and the decadence that it exalts even when the allusions are abstract. The cup of trembling, the sight of the father's foot in the first story. Baldwin is a writer whom people have expected something out of and have been disappointed with because he does not fit into the desired mold of the black writer or the gay writer or even the american writer. He can be an objective political essayist or a sentimental dramatist, and here, he offers cold, somewhat detatched portraits of american lives which are among the best portraits of these people ever written. He puts the lives of marginal americans, from poor white rural southerners, to expatriates, and black urban displaced men and women, into the dramatic realm that hints of myth. His descriptions are riveting, his sexual honesty can be rude, exposing the reader to the America that exposed him.

Each of the stories contained in this book deal frankly and honestly with the fear and agony associated with love, hate, prejudice and the suffering humans endure at the hands of their fellow man. All the stories are intense, haunting and in the case of the title story, "Going to Meet the Man", just plain chilling. Other notable stories are "The Man Child", "Sonny's Blues" and "Previous Condition". This is a good place to start if you're just discovering James Baldwin. Also recommended are his novels, "Giovanni's Room", "Another Country" and "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone".

I am slowly understanding why Mr. Baldwin elected to leave the United States for more than a decade in the 1940s and 1950s. He apparently is on record as saying that he needed to flee because his anger was going to destroy him if he did not seek a respite from American injustice.

Upon reading this collection, I think I am really beginning to understand what must have been going through his mind. Read "Previous Condition" where a young African American man keeps being thrown out of hotels and denied jobs simply because of the color of his skin. There is nowhere he can go without meeting the hostile glances and conspiratorial whispers of people on the street simply because of his skin color. And there is a moment where it all came into focus for me, standing in the kitchen of his Jewish friend's Jules' apartment. And I quote:

"Oh," I cried, "I know you think I'm making it dramatic, that I'm paranoiac and just inventing trouble! Maybe I think so sometimes, how can I tell? You get so used to being hit you find you're always waiting for it. Oh, I know, you're Jewish, you get kicked around, too, but you can walk into a bar and nobody knows you're Jewish and if you go looking for job you'll get a better job than mine!" (78)

It is deeply disturbing to think that a person has the suspicion and rage of the world cocked against their temple, but that was how it was (and still is). I have read much about the Civil Rights struggle and as a Jew myself, have listened to many stories from members of my family about prejudice but these stories, they uncover something. After seeing what happened in New Orleans with Katrina and listening to the empty discussions of "good schools", No Child Left Behind and test score mania, it opens your eyes to the fact that performance, optimism and opportunity are perceptions that, when absent, can ruin lives in ways that are hard to qualify.

I highly recommend these stories but be prepared to become deeply uncomfortable because Baldwin had a powerful case to make about American hypocrisy and he makes it.

A memorable book. It has been some years since I read this book but I still remember the impact it had on me, particularly the story about the deputy who remembers the day his parents took him to see a black man being publicly hanged. Powerful stuff and highly recommended.

James Baldwin is known primarily for his essays and his first two novels ("Go Tell It on the Mountain" and "Giovanni's Room"), but I often tell readers that the place to start is with his first story collection, "Going to Meet the Man." Baldwin's short fiction is more straightforward and accessible than are his essays (which are indeed excellent); each of the eight stories presents a different aspect of Baldwin's worldview; and unlike his early novels, where racism is treated as one aspect in the lives of characters, several of these stories confront the "racial issue" full on.

Baldwin's short fiction may be easier to read, but it does not avoid uncomfortable truths. In fact, some of Baldwin's most heated writing can be found in this volume, which was first published in 1965. It contains work written over a 20-year-period, including "Previous Condition," the first piece of fiction he ever published (in Commentary Magazine in 1948). A fledgling actor is torn between the black world of Harlem ("perfectly in his element, in his place, as the saying goes") and the white neighborhoods downtown. He stays at a friend's apartment in lower Manhattan, but has to hide from the landlord and leave the building at odd hours to avoid being seen by the other residents ("Why don't you go uptown, where you belong?").

Each of the other stories is unforgettable in its own way, but my two favorites open and close the volume. "The Rockpile" is an early (yet different) version of an episode in "Go Tell It on the Mountain"; two of Baldwin's strengths are his ability to capture the memories of youth and to present the complexities of family life. The incendiary title story that ends the volume depicts a white police officer whose racial attitudes were formed by a lynching he witnessed as a child. Baldwin pits the very real horror of the police brutality experienced by a young man who attempts to register to vote against the officer's wholly imagined fear of the oversexed black stereotype.

This last story--indeed, much of Baldwin's later fiction--has been criticized (by biographer James Campbell, for example) for lacking "a neutrality which Baldwin was finding harder than ever to maintain" and an unwillingness to "concede that somewhere, somehow, this corrupted man might incorporate genuine goodness." Such comments seem unfair on two counts: the actions of some racists, while "pitiable," are still beyond redemption or "goodness," and (more to the point) I don't agree that it's a storyteller's responsibility to make lemonade out of every lemon.

So ignore the critics who argue that Baldwin's fiction lost its shine as he grew older and more cynical and less "neutral," and pick up this excellent collection of stories. I think you'll find that their bluntness and honesty and gritty realism make up for whatever stylistic faults the critics might point to.

A fabulous collection of short stories that have not really aged in spite of the forty years gone since they were first published.

Sonny's Blues is a real gem because it shows three ways out of deprevation, out of the mental ghetto that grows in a real ghetto, like Harlem, out of desperation and dereliction.

One can go upward in society, become a teacher, through hard studies, get married, raise a family. In one way, accept the American Dream and forget about the tragedy, or the nightmare. « God Save the American Republic ! »

One can get into music and into a completely different world of imagination, art, harmony, research, rhythm, melody, all that the world does not provide. That is the Blues, Jazz, the fairyland of OZ. Unluckily you have to go there and come back. « God pity us, the terrified republic ! »

And one can get into heroin, the fabulous horse of American history, the mythical horse of the Great Plains, the mystical horse of the Railroads, the heavenlike horse of Indians and Blacks. Forget all that and shoot your veins. « He who sees his veins can see his pains ! »

James Baldwin is a master in the field of transforming human pain into heavenly light by sharing it with our souls. It does not erase the pain. It just makes it luminous, the light of a new way to some hazardous future. « But where danger is, rescue is ready too », as Hölderlin used to say.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

James Baldwin is one of the best authors, in my opinion. Everything he wrote scores a 5 star rating with me. His stories are well written, full of compassion and drama. He puts so much of himself in his stories that it's sad to read them. The first time I read a book by James Baldwin I was hooked. If you like books about man's general evilness to his fellowman and the sickness of religious fanatics you'll love James Baldwin.

I have been, as is my wont when I get "hooked" on some writer, on something of a James Baldwin tear of late, reading or re-reading everything I can get my hands on. At the time of this review I have already looked at "Go Tell It On The Mountain", the play "Blues For Mr. Charlie", "Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone", and "The Fire Next Time". Those works, well written and powerful reminded me of why I was crazy to read everything that Baldwin wrote when I was a kid. I do not recall then having read any short stories by Baldwin, at least none that were memorable like one of the stories, "Sonny's Blues", in this "Going To Meet The Man" compilation.

Now great writers, and I hope at this point in our common American literary experiences no one need argue James Baldwin's place in the canon, sometimes are capable of writing both great novels and short stories. Baldwin seems to be in that category, although off of this selection it may be a bit premature to make that judgment because most of the material appears to have been "first drafts" of later, full novelistic treatments. For example, "The Morning, The Evening, So Soon", the subject matter of which is the fame of a expatriate black actor-singer who despite that fame is still subject to all the racial taunts and tensions of a stay-at-home performer. (I am writing this review just after the passing away of the pioneer black singer/actress/black liberation fighter, Lena Horne.) That subject gets fuller treatment in "Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone."

Other subjects that get a preliminary workout here are the deep religious experience of Baldwin's fundamentalist Protestant youth, "The Outing" that will get a full-blown treatment in "Go Tell It On The Mountain." Of course, the subject of homosexuality, and bi-sexuality, are obliquely presented in several stories, Baldwin, along with Gore Vidal being something of American literary pioneers, if not honored as such at the time, on the subject. And of course, as with all of Baldwin serious work, we are treated to various manifestations of the ever present "race" question; interracial sex and marriage; degrees of blackness; white racism; black attitudes toward white racism; and the purposeful insularity of the white world in dealing, or nor dealing, with these questions, then and now.

What you want to get this particular compilation for though, as I mentioned above, is for "Sonny's Blues". Now it is almost impossible to find any writer, any American writer at least, worth his or he salt who came of literary age in the 1950s who was not influenced, even if only around the edges, by "be-bop" jazz. Baldwin is no exception, although his race is not the only reason for that statement. The rhythm of the cool, abstract, high white note "be-bop jazz" that sent audiences into a frenzy of delight are a simple companion to the sparser, less lyrical literary beat of 1950's writing. Mailer, Kerouac, and most of the New York intellectual crew feasted, and feasted well, on that inner sound. But, nobody got it righter than James Baldwin in "Sonny's Blues."

What seemingly starts out as another one of Baldwin's epistles on, literally, brotherly love; that of two brothers, one, Sonny, several years younger than the other, who "grew up" in Harlem, grew away from each other by choice or circumstances,, reunited when now famed jazz pianist brother, Sonny, got caught up trying to reach that "high white note" via the "horse" drug connection that also has been associated with bop, turns into one of the best expositions of what jazz meant to the listener, and to the artist struggling to find his inner voice, that I have ever read.

The last several pages, in counterpoint to the first several, are truly lyrical as Baldwin puts in words on the printed page what a struggle it was for Sonny, and his fellow band members in New York cafe society, to "make the gods listen." And to make the heavens cry out for the high side of the human experience. You or I could try to write such lines for two hundred years and we could not get it right. Kudos, James.

The first story I read in this was "Sonny's Blues" and I realized there was more to it than just a story- and that the blues is more than just b5ths but a greater understanding of life - highly recommended.

James Baldwin is a tortured soul. He pours his whole soul onto every page. This makes him one of America's greatest writers. His word pictures take you into the church, on a picnic, into a country farm house and into the lives of all his characters. Long Live James Baldwin. In our hearts.