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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Deprived People

Deprived People

Mr Fiedler is a lively and aggressive critic, an iconoclast in the tradition of Mencken. His essays on Whitman, R.L. Stevenson, Robert Penn Warren, and others, resemble the work-out of a champion boxer – the books and the writers are punch-bags, objects for a powerful analytical wit. In some ways this kind of criticism is more honest than the assumed universal objectivity of the carefully academic commentator. I find those essays in which he meets his own problems head-on, and discusses the difficult minority status of American Jews, the most rewarding. His analysis of public attitudes to the Leopold-Loeb trial is quite masterly. Mr Fiedler (with a few cracks in passing at the gross anti-Semite) reserves his best punches for the muddled liberal conscience which desires to extend tolerance equally to Jews and homosexuals. One can only applaud him. Such boils need to be lanced. And who would have more right to do so that Mr Fiedler, who has no doubt suffered interminably at the hands of self-styled tolerant [people?]?

page 659

Mr Braithwaite’s book is equally controversial. A Negro born in British Guiana, educated in New York and England, his iron-clad intellectual grip has been developed in contact with the so-far-no-further social attitudes of the white races. In many ways Mr Braithwaite thinks entirely like an Englishman; perhaps his situation, setting aside the colour-bar, resembles most that of a New Zealander who goes to London only to find suddenly that he is a colonial. But (unlike that New Zealander) he has, if he chooses, an ancestral motherland – the continent of Africa, where many Negroes have developed the hope, the full political rights, and the mutual respect and understanding denied them elsewhere. He visits Ghana, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, and what he finds there is in effect a buried part of himself. His traveller’s commentary on the rising nations of Africa is unsensational, but very cheering: for under great poverty and political conflict Mr Braithwaite discerns the new solidarity, mutual love and serious purpose of a long-deprived people.

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