Add the Irish author Colm Tóibín (Long Island) to the long list of writers inspired by James Baldwin. Brandeis University invited Tóibín to give a series of lectures celebrating Baldwin's life and work to coincide with Baldwin's 2024 centenary. Tóibín was an apt and inspired choice, as the five entries in On James Baldwin make clear. At 18, Tóibín briefly considered entering the seminary, but then he read Go Tell It on the Mountain, with its evocation of "Henry James, the high priest of American refinement," and "the way in which the heightened emotion around ritual and religious belief strayed into same-sex desire, rendering the latter as unfathomable and as sacred as the former, but more dangerous." This was at a time when Tóibín was coming to terms with his "pale, hidden homosexuality." So much for the seminary.
Each of these erudite pieces pays tribute to Baldwin's achievements. Tóibín, who rendered Henry James so vividly in The Master, offers many examples of Baldwin's influence on his own work and that of others; gives astute analyses of works such as Giovanni's Room, which, like E.M. Forster's Maurice, was written "in a time when homosexuality was not merely forbidden or disapproved of, but also strangely invisible"; and draws parallels between Baldwin's writings and that of others, such as noting that Giovanni's Room and Oscar Wilde's De Profundis both "dramatize the love between two men under pressure." Readers new to Baldwin as well as those who have read his entire output will savor this appreciative work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer