Colm Tóibín’s The Pitch of Passion, adapted from On James Baldwin.
In essays and interviews Baldwin needed to unloose himself from easy categories, but it was also central to his procedures as an artist to share James’s interest in consciousness as shifting and unconfined but also hidden and secretive, and his concern with language as both pure revelation and mask. Baldwin was fascinated with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence, as much as with the plain, declarative line.
[…]For Baldwin, the past was bound up with place, and since his sense of place was bound up with displacement, the past did not come simply. What is strange is how stories from the past represent the very center of Go Tell It on the Mountain, enough to make it a novel about how the displacement caused by the Great Migration entered into the spirit of these characters and their relationships. The novel has a shadow world where the past happened, where the earlier generation came from, and where much that was unresolved had been left behind.
