Intelligent Cat

NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME (241 pp.) --James Baldwin--Dial ($4.50).

Negroes who write dislike being classified as "Negro writers"; yet almost without exception, that is what they are--not because they write about Negro life, but because they tend to be obsessed with the Negro's relationship to the white world. James Baldwin shares that obsession, but he expresses it not merely with passion but with candor, describing himself in this book of essays as an "abnormally intelligent, and hungry black cat." Hungry he has surely been; intelligent he clearly is. Although he sometimes low-rates the country that he claims to love, his anger at the wrongs done his people is relatively restrained, hence doubly effective.

Nobody Knows My Name goes on from where Harlem-born Author Baldwin left off in Notes of a Native Son (TIME, Dec. 5, 1955). In the intervening years, his indignation as a Negro and as an American has grown, but so has his intellectual grasp. There is wisdom of a kind in Baldwin's warning that "the South will not change--cannot change--until the North changes . . . The country will not change until it re-examines itself and discovers what it really means by freedom . . . Walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we, this nation, have become."

At times Baldwin carries the reasoning behind his protest to precarious lengths. He reports of a Negro housing project in Harlem where "they had scarcely moved in, naturally, before they began smashing windows, defacing walls, urinating in the elevators, and fornicating in the playgrounds." Yet he condones such behavior on the debatable grounds that the tenants were in a ghetto and were responding as presumably they had a right to.

But the book has few such lapses of logic. Whether he is blasting William Faulkner for his ambiguous stand on the Negro problem or interviewing Swedish Movie Director Ingmar Bergman, Author Baldwin writes with grace and insight. His accounts of trips to two Southern cities are balanced and perceptive. He also makes it plain that whites who try to get into the castle of the black man's skin are tolerated at best. Says Baldwin of his friend Norman Mailer: "They thought he was a real sweet ofay* cat but a little frantic."

One of the best essays in the book is Alas, Poor Richard, a sad but enlightening account of Baldwin's unhappy friendship with the late Negro Novelist Richard Wright. Like Wright, Baldwin tried expatriating himself in Paris. After nearly nine years he decided that he could go home again; Paris had taught him that whatever the atmosphere at home, he was irrevocably an American. And of his white fellow expatriates: "They were no more at home in Europe than I was." Unlike Wright, he knew that neither of them would have found Paris "a city of refuge" if they "had not been armed with American passports." He saw Wright lose first his country, then his sympathy for U.S. Negroes and even the regard of Africans. Said one of them: "I believe he thinks he's white."

*Pig Latin for "foe" or white man.

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