Elsewhere, but always subsumed within more general issues, I have argued for paying more attention to the Gothicism in the writings of James Kirke Paulding, whose literary career spanned the first half of the nineteenth century. He is one of those American writers who, like murder, will out, despite more neglect than his accomplishments deserve. By 1830 - to cite but one example of Paulding‘s significance - when Hawthorne and Poe were still apprentices in the craft of short fiction, a span of years had passed during which Paulding‘s productions in this genre clearly justified such labels as ‘the Paulding decade of the short story’ (Amos L. Herold‘s designation). Harold E. Hall, moreover, ranks ‘Cobus Yerks and ‘The Dumb Girl’, two Paulding tales from this period, among the finest early nineteenth-century American short stories. Although personal and career necessities often drew him away from literary pursuits, Paulding should by no means be ignored; his name keeps surfacing, particularly when the topic is literary nationalism, as Benjamin T. Spencer, John Seelye, Michael John McDonough, and I have already indicated. Paulding is also remembered as a pioneer in presenting frontier life in fiction and for his early essays in what we now term Southwestern Humor.1
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This article delves into James Baldwin’s work and experience in the pivotal year 1968. Working with archival materials and granular contexts that are still not a full part of our understanding of Baldwin’s story, this article paints a fuller and more nuanced portrait of Baldwin’s position astraddle cultural cross-currents that were in volatile and often violent relationship to each other and at times to themselves. The “sixties” were ending in flames as Baldwin had forecast at the outset of the decade. Baldwin was based in California, often in transit to New York and London, working in ways that were at once high-profile and underground—to the extent that we’re only now seeing real evidence of some of these conversations. The result is a fuller account of how Baldwin developed and deployed his gifts with risk-taking generosity and intergenerational brilliance during one of the most volatile years of the twentieth century in the United States and beyond.
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Interviewing can be a vampiric act especially when it involves leeching from its subject the fluidic exchange which exists between life and art. The vampire novelist Anne Rice had agreed to let me interview her at Waterstones Bookshop in Bristol, England, on 26 January 1993 about the fourth book in her Vampire Chronicles, The Tale of the Body Thief (1992). In the interview she describes the novel as dealing with the differences between art and life and mortality and immortality. Specifically, the story examines the paradox of choosing to be Undead for the sake of life, and the way in which art opens up a locus for a redemption that is outside of life. In my view, the text is as much about the process of interviewing as about authorship. A more obvious example is Rice‘s well-known novel Interview with the Vampire (1976) in which the hapless interviewer eventually enters into the very narrative he is recording by becoming another Ricean revenant.