James Baldwin and Film Beyond the American Century

This article provides an introduction to this special section of James Baldwin Review 7 devoted to Baldwin and film. Jackson considers Baldwin’s distinct approach to film criticism by pairing him with James Agee, another writer who wrote fiction as well as nonfiction in several genres, and who produced a large body of film criticism, especially during the 1940s. While Agee, a white southerner born almost a generation before Baldwin, might seem an unlikely figure to place alongside Baldwin, the two shared a great deal in terms of temperament and vision, and their film writings reveal a great deal of consensus in their diagnoses of American pathologies. Another important context for Baldwin’s complex relationship to film is television, which became a dominant media form during the 1950s and exerted a great influence upon both the mainstream reception of the civil rights movement and Baldwin’s reception as a public intellectual from the early 1960s to the end of his life. Finally, the introduction briefly discusses the articles that constitute this special section.

Dalí’s Montaigne

This chapter analyses the hybridization of the essay with visual genres such as illustration, photography, film, and video, an emergent tendency throughout the twentieth century that underscores the shared features of essayism and Surrealism. These include the use of a logic of digression and free association, a focus on the inner life of the self, the dismissal of formal strictures, the deployment of sensory perception, memory, intuition, and imagination towards expressive ends, and the reliance on images. Beginning with Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Montaigne’s Essays (1947), the chapter then turns to James Agee and Walker Evans’ collaborative photo essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Chris Marker’s essay-film Sans soleil (1982), and John Bresland’s video essay Mangoes (2010) in order to pinpoint the shared affinities between essayism and Surrealism.

The Writer as Reporter: Portraiture in Literary Reportage and Documentary Writing

This article explores how several novelists in the first half of the twentieth century, including James Agee, Jack London, George Orwell, and John Steinbeck, portrayed other, often marginal, real lives in works of reportage and documentary writing—terms variously defined and utilised by critics and practitioners, but seen here as hybrid, intersecting forms of life writing. It argues that such work has an extremely artful element of verbal portraiture of real-life people, often in dialogue with photography. The process of writing and witnessing reportage work differs substantially from that of fiction. Focusing on certain factors key to the portraiture in reportage—including unfamiliarity, representativeness, standpoint, and objectivity—the article analyses these writers’ treatment of them. The extent to which these writers revealed their documentary or reportorial role to their subjects, or disguised it, is also considered. Moving between international, cultural, political and social contexts, and deeply informed by chance and accident, early twentieth century reportage emerges as a highly interactive, volatile, and intersubjective space in its portraiture of others, nonetheless defined finally by the writer’s point of view.

Prelude to War

This chapter reveals the most accurate account of Barber’s first major commission, the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. It was commissioned in 1939 by Samuel Fels of Fels-Naptha soap for his ward Iso Briselli, a young violinist prodigy. Barber’s work on the concerto in Switzerland was interrupted by the impending Nazi invasion in Poland and, on arriving home, the illness of his father. As the work could not be completed in time for Briselli’s debut, it was premiered instead by Albert Spalding and the Philadelphia Orchestra and received a generous response, newspapers reporting it to be an “exceptional popular success.” The chapter also features four songs on texts by Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Agee, W. B. Yeats, and Frederic Prokosch, a friend of Barber’s. It mentions the piano trio he wrote for the wedding of Barber’s sister Sara and his nomination to the National Institute of Arts and Letters as its youngest member.

Middle Years

After his discharge from the Army, Barber continued work with the Office of War Information but was able to work at home. He received a commission from John Nicholas Brown for a Cello Concerto for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. Written to include the strengths and predilections of cellist Raya Garbousova, the concerto is considered one of the most challenging contemporary works of the genre and won Barber the Fifth Annual Award of the Music Critics Circle of New York. Reputedly one of the most promising American composers of his time, Barber also composed music for Martha Graham’s ballet about Medea, Cave of the Heart. In 1947, under the shadow of his father’s deteriorating health and Louise Homer’s impending death, Barber composed his most “American work,” Knoxville: Summer of 1915, for voice and orchestra. It is set to a nostalgic prose-poem by James Agee and was premiered by the Boston Symphony with Eleanor Steber as soloist. Following this, Barber composed a piano sonata for Vladimir Horowitz, a work that had the most stunning impact on the American musical world.

Awe

By awe, philosophers and psychologists mean the sensation that overcomes someone in the presence of something simultaneously vast, powerful, and, when compared to humans, strangely humbling. The chapter begins with a review of amazing discoveries such as island universes, the expanding universe, and the Big Bang that altered the understanding of the universe and made the solar system “seem but a speck of dust in infinite space.” It then turns to other sources of awe, or the Depression sublime: the Empire State Building; Jesse Owens’s record-setting long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; the moral heroism of the Joads in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; and James Agee and Walker Evans’s deification of tenant farmers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Whereas most accounts of the sublime involve the vastness of nature overwhelming human beings, during the Depression human beings themselves became a source of the sublime.