James Baldwin, _The Devil Finds Work_

IN QUEER STREET, James McCourt passes along (in three places, I think) that Gore Vidal once observed to James Baldwin, "You don't get to be Martin Luther King and Bette Davis." Boy, does that sound like Vidal, or what? But--is he right? After all, Vidal himself made a go at being both Abraham Lincoln and Oscar Wilde. So why can't Baldwin be both MLK and she of the eyes?

The Devil Finds Work is particularly valuable because it's more in the key of Davis than that of King, and gives us a Baldwin we only occasionally glimpse in the more famous essays. "Whites may or may not deserve to be hated, depending on how one manipulates one's reserves of energy, and what one makes of history: in any case, the reassurance is false, the need ignoble, and the question, in this context, absolutely irrelevant." The accents of Margo Channing resound in "depending on how one's manipulates one's reserves of energy," and that's a nicely stuck Margo landing as well. Or try this: "Neither does it suggest that the distinction between Big Business and Organized Crime is like the old ad, which asks, Which Twin has the Toni?"

The first chapter of The Devil Finds Work is highly autobiographical, but dealing mainly with Baldwin's first acquaintance with the theater, both in its stage and its screen versions. The other two chapters are largely discussions of particular films and particular performances.

These discussions are definitely about race in the United States as well--Baldwin is writing about Birth of a Nation, The Defiant Ones, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Lady Sings the Blues, and other films in which Hollywood does its limited best to deal with race--but even so, a reader gets the feeling that Baldwin is happy just to dish about movies.

One sentence begins, "My buddy, Ava Gardner, once asked me...". His discussions of The Exorcist and Lawrence of Arabia do circle back around, and tellingly, to the subject of race, but he seems obviously to be enjoying himself in ways he rarely allowed himself to do:

Lawrence of Arabia, stemming, both dimly and helplessly, from T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is a kind of muted and updated, excruciatingly astute version of Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din. The word "muted" does not refer to the musical score, which must be the loudest in the history of cinema, and which is absolutely indispensable to the intention of the film.

Bette on, James.