✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

The Paris Review - The Private Life: On James Baldwin - The Paris Review

theparisreview.org · 1,080 words · saved by 1 readers

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, LICENSED UNDER CC BY-SA 3.0. In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as public events presse

and some extra features. It allows to use jQuery.dotdotdot only by adding appropriate CSS classes without JS programming. ### Available classes and their description * dot-ellipsis - automatically invoke jQuery.dotdotdot to this element. This class must be included if you plan to use other classes below. * dot-resize-update - automatically update if window resize event occurs. It's equivalent to option `watch:'window'`. * dot-timer-update - automatically update if window resize event occurs. It's equivalent to option `watch:true`. * dot-load-update - automatically update after the window has b

Explore this link on the map →

related reading