When Buckley Met Baldwin

In 1965, the two intellectual giants squared off in a debate at Cambridge. It didn't go quite as Buckley hoped.

- Sam Tanenhaus

Cambridge Union with one of the most celebrated writers alive, the novelist, memoirist, critic, and essayist James Baldwin.

Buckley had been paying attention to Baldwin. He had read and admired his novel Another Country, which subtly explored complex gay and racial themes.

But he disliked Baldwin's journalism and his profuse commentary on race.

Baldwin, he had written, "celebrates his bitterness against the white community mostly in journals of the far political left," which suggested complicity-or was it cowardice? on the part of guilt-ridden white editors.

Baldwin's presence in England was itself an event. He was there to promote the paperback edition of Another Country and to discuss a screenplay with a filmmaker.

He also made himself available to journalists and students. And there was the debate with Buckley at the Cambridge Union-a debate on the subject of race in America.

Baldwin's numerous venues were not, as it happened, limited to those of the left. His arguments, moreover, were original and unorthodox, and at times even paralleled Buckley's own. Baldwin, too, was skeptical of liberal programs and the meliorist principles they rested on. When he observed that the "mountain of sociological investigations, committee reports, and plans for recreational centers have failed to change the face of Harlem," a conservative could agree.

The difference came in the conclusions Baldwin drew. The true lessons of race in America, he argued, began in what had been revealed about its white population.