Pablo Casals

come very simple—literally, brutally simple. There was no love in the Negro church he preached in; there is no love in the white churches either; all white men are obsessed with Negro sexuality; there is nothing worth saving from the past, so any change is for the better; we need only “accept change.” It is a message delivered with intimidating emotional intensity, but it is, in its essential content, the message of Ida. Faced with all the complexities of her relation with Vivaldo, she would prefer, at times, simply to shatter that relation with one blow, even if the blow crushes both of them. And Bald win, faced with the complexities he lives with and writes about, must feel at times the temptation to call the whole tangle a lie or an illusion. Hoping it isn’t.

It is not enough for us merely to sympathize with Baldwin’s unhappy childhood, felicitate him on his style and send him back to Paris with more scholarships and literary prizes. He deserves an answer; he deserves a fight. He is an adversary worth our best arguments, and one of the uses of the fight is that it may force us to remember what our best arguments are. Once we do that, we have won; and so has he.

RT

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Ralph de Toledano

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come very simple—literally, brutally simple. There was no love in the Negro church he preached in; there is no love in the white churches either; all white men are obsessed with Negro sexuality; there is nothing worth saving from the past, so any change is for the better; we need only “accept change.” It is a message delivered with intimidating emotional intensity, but it is, in its essential content, the message of Ida. Faced with all the complexities of her relation with Vivaldo, she would prefer, at times, simply to shatter that relation with one blow, even if the blow crushes both of them. And Bald win, faced with the complexities he lives with and writes about, must feel at times the temptation to call the whole tangle a lie or an illusion. Hoping it isn’t.

It is not enough for us merely to sympathize with Baldwin’s unhappy childhood, felicitate him on his style and send him back to Paris with more scholarships and literary prizes. He deserves an answer; he deserves a fight. He is an adversary worth our best arguments, and one of the uses of the fight is that it may force us to remember what our best arguments are. Once we do that, we have won; and so has he.