Liberalism, Libido, Liberation

when james baldwin's third novel, Another Country, was published in 1962, it was met with outrage and disappointment by nearly every major reviewer in the New York literary scene. Another Country, most reviewers felt, failed to fulfill the promise of Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952), and his by then famous essays on race relations in the United States. ¹ (His second novel, Giovannis Room [1956], was to most critics so foreign in location and so aberrant in subject matter that it practically did not count in an assessment of his reputation.) ² To many reviewers in the mainstream press, the new novel seemed too unforgiving in its judgment of white, middle-class liberalism, too shrill and dogmatic in its presentation of racism, and too ready to endorse alternative, bohemian—especially homosexual— lifestyles. To African-American critics, the novel was neither sufficiently focused on black experience nor compelling as political analysis, for it appeared more interested in the salvation of individual characters than radical social change. ³