Customer Reviews

Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin

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"Talking at the Gates" is a rough-hewn but valuable biography of James Baldwin written by someone who knew him during the last decade of his life. Author James Campbell is honest about both his aim and the result; his book "is offered not as a definitive picture but as a host of sketches and perceptions aiming towards a definition." Eminently readable and discerning, these "sketches and perceptions" offer a great introduction to the life of one of America's greatest twentieth-century writers.

The strength of this biography is Campbell's gathering of the oral history of Baldwin's life through interviews with those who knew him, and he is best when describing his pivotal friendships with Lucien Happersberger and Engin Cezzar, his feuds with Richard Wright and Norman Mailer, and his associations with those in the civil rights movement. (Inexplicably, Baldwin's lifelong friend Sol Stein is never mentioned in the book.) Also fascinating are the documents found in Baldwin's FBI dossier; Campbell has added an afterword to the 2002 edition describing his battle to unseal the file. Although these documents serve to validate Baldwin's ceaseless paranoia, they are so filled with rumors, fabrications, and outright nonsense that they prove to be incidental to his life; inevitably, they tell us more about the FBI (and its insidious role in the civil rights movement) than about James Baldwin, and Campbell places undue emphasis on their importance.

The book's value as a literary biography is tempered by the author's own tastes, and since this was written only four years after Baldwin's death, Campbell forgoes assessments of Baldwin's evolving legacy among writers and critics. He clearly feels that Baldwin was at his best as an essayist and, with the exception of "Go Tell It on a Mountain," he is often severe in his criticism of the novels and stories. In particular, he damns Baldwin's later work with faint praise--sometimes rightfully, but sometimes too hastily. For example, the splendid "Just Above My Head" (which, I think, has greatly improved with age) is praised for "magnificence in the conception" but summarized with a laundry list of supposed faults ("too many bloodless characters, too neatly divided into goodies and baddies; too strong a dependence on colour as an indicator of virtue; too many rambling conversations and descriptions") and for having "no plot," which seems a peculiar thing to say about a novel that follows the life of a world-famous gospel singer from birth to death. During the two decades since Campbell's biography was written, Baldwin's novels and stories have become, I would argue, more highly regarded. But his non-fiction, while still uniquely powerful and elegant, carry the unfortunate burden of Sixties-era fervor and have increasingly assumed the guise of historical documents--groundbreaking and essential, yes, but not always timeless ("The Fire Next Time," "Notes of a Native Son," and "Stranger in the Village" being, of course, among the absolute exceptions).

James Baldwin deserves a thorough and scholarly treatment along the lines of the recent biographies of his contemporaries John Cheever, Raymond Carver, and Flannery O'Connor. Campbell may well prove to be Baldwin's Boswell, but we await his definitive and impartial biographer.