JAMES BALDWIN FOUND ME WHEN I WENT LOOKING FOR the devil. I had good reason to be looking: not only because I was a wobbling Catholic (beware of any other kind) but because I was almost born prematurely in a movie theater in 1974 as my parents sat quaking to The Exorcist. I’d always known this; it was one of the first things I could remember my mother telling me: “Never watch that movie. It nearly made you a preemie.” All through the erratic tacking of my teens and twenties, and through shifting degrees of unbelief, I stuck closely to my mother’s paranoid warning—until my early thirties, when deliberately not watching a devil movie seemed worse than cowardly. It seemed a bit silly.
As it turned out, it was The Exorcist that was silly. I could not comprehend what had spooked my nineteen-year-old mother into false-birth pangs. We Catholics, I suppose, lapsed or not, are a superstitious, demon-happy lot; it doesn’t take all that much to get our demonic cogs going, our welcome, ecstatic dread of damnation. After I failed to be harassed by The Exorcist, I went in search of Satan-related material (mostly by Jeffrey Burton Russell, devil scholar par excellence) in order to aid myself in understanding that failure. I say that James Baldwin discovered me at this time and not the other way around because I hadn’t gone looking for him, and yet there he was, waiting for me. I’m told by some that God and love often function this way: they find you. Gaily lost in the stacks of Boston University’s Mugar Library, I turned into an aisle, and there, out of place at eye-level, was Baldwin’s 1976, impeccably titled little book The Devil Finds Work.
I knew Baldwin as the author of the much-anthologized short story “Sonny’s Blues,” and I knew his reputation as a necessary American intellect, but he was among the many necessary intellects I had not yet got around to. Reading The Devil Finds Work was for me one of those scarce encounters when a reader understands that he’ll never be safe from a writer, that he’ll have to go in search of that writer’s every sentence, imbibe him whole. Joseph Brodsky once said that while intelligent writers can make you feel lacking, W. H. Auden was so out-of-this-world intelligent that he makes you feel intelligent, too: he articulates and confirms your best thoughts, dispels your worst. Baldwin is like that: so smart and sane it’s impossible to read him, to experience the staunch morality of his perception, and not sense yourself growing smarter and saner by the page.
Like Orwell’s, Baldwin’s powers are put most beautifully to use in nonfiction. Baldwin insists on a dignified pathos, insists that every essay or review be unabashedly personal, germane not only to the quaking times but to his own vista, his own history as artist and witness, which is why he so often employs memoir in criticism. Personal testimony, not mere confession: he is always clear in that distinction. Wilde said that literary criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography; with Baldwin’s criticism you get Wilde’s meaning. (While Baldwin doesn’t refer to Wilde anywhere in his work, you wish that he had: it’s hard to find two cutting minds more kindred than theirs.)
The Devil Finds Work is an exhilarating alloy of memoir, film criticism, and social comment. Baldwin’s thoughts on The Exorcist were my thoughts, except I lacked the articulation necessary to forge those thoughts into sentences. That’s the distinct aptitude of all eminent writers: they give you not only the new thoughts you need but the proper phrasing for the thoughts you already have. The Exorcist, Baldwin writes, is “afflicted with . . . pious ambiguity,” and at its core is “desperately compulsive, and compulsive, precisely, in the terror of its unbelief.” Baldwin refers here, in part, to the character of Father Karras, who admits that his belief has gone limp right before Satan comes around to re-stiffen it. Baldwin stresses his disgust at the obscene suggestion that hell is the revenge visited upon any unbeliever, and then he gives us this:
The Exorcist has absolutely nothing going for it, except Satan, who is certainly the star: I can say only that Satan was never like that when he crossed my path (for one thing, the evil one never so rudely underestimated me). His concerns were more various, and his methods more subtle. The Exorcist is not in the least concerned with damnation, an abysm far beyond the confines of its imagination.
For Baldwin, the filmmakers falter theologically, historically, and socially. In his own life he dealt with what Isaiah Berlin defined, in his Four Essays on Liberty, as the only real evils on earth: injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance. Our focus on a crimson Pan with a pitchfork and tail seems a perverse and childish enterprise when real, human evil is wrecking people’s lives in every pocket of America. Baldwin would not forget this, and he would make sure that we did not forget it, either.
How frequently he refers to the devil; how frequently the term “evil” hisses in his nonfiction, as both noun and adjective. Speaking to Studs Terkel, in 1961, about living in a Swiss village: “Those Swiss people really thought I had been sent by the devil.” In his 1964 essay “Nothing Personal”: “It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.” Writing about Shakespeare that same year: “Evil comes into the world by means of some vast, inexplicable and probably ineradicable human fault.” And of course The Devil Finds Work is replete with “evil” and the evil one: “He who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet.” Or: “In our church, the Devil had many faces, all of them one’s own. He was not always evil, rarely was he frightening—he was, more often, subtle, charming, cunning, and warm.” Baldwin cribs nicely from Hamlet there: “The devil hath power / T’ assume a pleasing shape.” He was sentenced to be an American Jacob forever wrestling with devils dressed as saving angels. But he always knew the difference; he always saw the ruse.
As someone who was brought up to believe that evil has real and lasting potency in our lives, I went on believing it long after I ceased to believe much else of what the priests and nuns had dished to me. To see Baldwin, a non-Catholic, take up evil in his way was a relief after my steady grapplings with Augustine and Aquinas, after the many exhortations I endured in the classroom and from the altar. In a 1948 book review, Baldwin admits that “it is difficult, if not impossible, for anyone not a Catholic to properly comprehend and discuss a Catholic philosopher.” But Baldwin thinks like an honorary Catholic: he understands the sins and superstitions of spirit and flesh, the fetishizing of blood, and the guilt we tote around after our transgressions against others and ourselves. He understands sacraments and sacrifice, the benedictions aiming for grace.
One of the first things to know about Baldwin is that he was a teenager minister, a preacher in his father’s Harlem church. (Actually his stepfather; he never knew his biological father. So much of Baldwin’s fiction, Go Tell It on the Mountain especially, bleeds from the wounds of the father/son clash. In a 1967 essay on Elia Kazan, he argues that “the father-son relationship is one of the most crucial and dangerous on earth, and to pretend that it can be otherwise really amounts to an exceedingly dangerous heresy.”) Such with-the-blood believing, such fervent proselytizing, was a bad fit for an intellect as enormous as Baldwin’s, for someone so wedded to reason, but those “adolescent holy-roller terrors,” as he writes, “marked me forever,” and how could they not? The sensitive and intelligent are almost always branded by the slick and the crass.
Religion for Baldwin is a mostly fraught affair, as it must be. He suffers with the soul-struggle you glimpse in the most resounding religious writers—in Augustine and Aquinas, in John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, in Simone Weil and Flannery O’Connor—and it is the bearing and baring of this struggle that allots Baldwin what Harold Bloom has named his “pathos of the prophetic predicament.” Although he chooses to tag himself a witness (and he witnessed much), Baldwin is really a secular prophet with a sacral message, a literary cleanser of sin. Think of his titles borrowed from the Bible (The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street) and how he co-opts and then renovates their meanings. Think of how the term soul permeates so much of his work, how essential the soul is to his comprehension of America’s ongoing crisis of class and race and mind.
Baldwin’s conception of soul cannot be disentangled from his writer’s need for privacy, by which he means a deep interiority, that inner realm that must remain exempt from the shameless shrieking and grating of the world. In a 1959 essay he writes: “Finally for me the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject—his key and ours to his achievement.” This commitment to the nobility of human privacy, to the dignity of silence, is a manner of enacting his commitment to the soul. His work is, at bottom, holy, and not just because his unloving stepfather was a preacher, and not just in its grasp of the sacred and profane, but in its refusal to relegate human integrity below the flapping of angels.
If it’s our lot to writhe halfway between beasts and gods, it is Baldwin’s hope that we will aspire more earnestly and mercifully toward the latter. He has, like his hero Henry James, an unrelenting eye on our interiority, and so the soul is his true subject: the responsibility of the individual soul, a kind of Emersonian self-reliance of soul, a self-accountability and self-control without which it’s impossible to sustain self-respect. “If you don’t survive your trouble out of your own resources,” he writes in 1964, “you have not really survived it; you have merely closed yourself against it.” And this: “There is nothing you can do for me. . . . It must be done for you.” He wanted no favors; what he did want was for you to stop looking at his skin and start looking at your own inner life.
For Baldwin, the strife of the soul is a subject that deserves much better than clerics; it deserves artists. In The Fire Next Time, he is unafraid of anti-clericalism or blasphemy; in fact, blasphemy remains essential to his ethical and technical program:
It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
What is the crux of Baldwin’s quarrel with religion? It must be understood as an issue much more practical than the obligatory Freudian revolt against his preacher-father. The answer to what engined this quarrel is available most explicitly in a 1948 book review: “It is unhelpful indeed to be assured of future angels when the mysteries of the present flesh are so far from being solved.” Unhelpful, yes, and vulgar. The flesh he means there is not only human flesh in general or black flesh in particular but all American flesh and its genesis in the trembling obsessions of Puritanism.
Like Baldwin and religion, Baldwin and America make a curious pair. All through his nonfiction we are confronted with the sins and sanctimonies of the land of the free. We are made to gauge “the American failure to face reality,” our “striking addiction to irreality” in “this peculiar purgatory which we call America.” We are, alas, “the most inarticulate people” he has ever come across (and he has come across many), “inarticulate and illiterate . . . unlettered in the language,” living our consumerist lives in “an emotional kindergarten.” Few American writers ever beheld American reality as uncompromisingly as Baldwin does: that word, “reality,” appears everywhere in his work. (At one point he refers to “that battered word, truth.”) For clear seeing such as his, one begins reaching for a roster of lionized names to give him company: Montaigne, Wilde, Hazlitt, Woolf.
Baldwin comprehends his bilious criticisms of America as a gesture of his love for her. At the start of Notes of a Native Son, he admits: “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” His 1962 essay “The Creative Process” contains this extraordinary line: “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, make freedom real.” A lover’s war: it is the artist’s duty to enter battle with his country. It is his duty to show society itself, and that duty doubles when society does not have the eyes to see. An artist gives his country eyes. “This most sinister and preposterous of Edens,” Baldwin writes, this land that boasts “a cultivated ignorance of all things public, and a terrified ignorance of all things private,” needs to stand and hear his judgments. If she is as good as she continuously claims she is, she will stand and hear him.
“This depthless alienation from oneself and one’s people is, in sum, the American experience”: a charge such as that cannot be unmade and it cannot be ignored. If, as Baudelaire contends in “The Generous Gambler,” the devil’s wiliest mischief is convincing us that he isn’t real, then Baldwin would not let those American devils—those who write textbooks, who hold offices and make laws—slither by uncontested. The Devil Finds Work contains these robust lines:
To encounter oneself is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and, if I can respect this, both of us can live. Neither of us, truly, can live without the other: a statement which would not sound so banal if one were not endlessly compelled to repeat it, and, further, believe it, and act on that belief.
What needs to be addressed here is Baldwin’s moral program: moral, not moralizing. If the soul is his true subject, then the soul must be conceived as a moral organ. In praising a novel called The Cool World in 1959, he refers, in anguished tones, to “the moral state of this country,” and in the preface to the 1984 edition of Notes of a Native Son, he makes this unassailable edict: “Moral change is the only real one.” Post that placard in every town square. If writers’ aesthetics are not moral, if they do not comprehend that style is inextricable from morality, then they’re just goofing off on their way to being forgotten.
Saul Bellow once dubbed Baldwin’s morality “fiery but formless,” and that’s off the mark in a most un-Bellovian manner. (Anyway, you can’t be both, since fire is by nature formless.) Baldwin’s morality is an obligation his intellect cannot discount, a reasoned necessity born of sapient heartbreak, of his being the ultimate American outsider: black, gay, and illegitimate. Edward P. Jones makes the point that even when Baldwin vents his exhausted dismay at the chore of being black in America, not only is he never pessimistic, but “he never shouts.” He is too dignified for shouting, too debonair, too certain of his character and intellect. Which doesn’t mean that he isn’t often nobly indignant, especially in his late-period work (see his 1970 open letter to jailed Angela Davis), only that shouting would be beneath his moral charisma. That style of being is itself the form of his morality: not amorphous impulses firing wildly, but an ethics erected on the rational certainty that goodness and beauty are superior to their opposites.
We live, Baldwin sees, in a “brutally indifferent world,” and we are forced to endure “our absolutely unspeakable loneliness,” what he calls, in 1962, “the human damage”: not only the damage done to us by unholy forces, or the damage we do to one another, but, more to the point, the damage we do to ourselves. For a writer who is contemptuous of psychotherapy and the wackier Freudian equations, he utters his most Freudian statement in 1967: “The truth of our pain is all we have, it is the key to who we are.” That’s not an emotional statement; that’s an artist’s moral statement. And there’s this, from his 1963 essay “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”: “Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. In this sense, all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever.” Peddle any ism and you cease to be an imaginative writer; you become instead an enlisted salesman.
If Baldwin could be said to have a moral philosophy of the artist in civilization, that philosophy concerns “the nature of the artist’s responsibility to his society. The peculiar nature of this responsibility is that he must never cease warring with it, for its sake and for his own.” He believes that “the entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and the outer chaos, literally, in order to make life bearable.” But the artist comprehends that the sundry ways we make life bearable also deprive it of deep meaning or spiritual merit, and so the artist must be a vigilant Joshua blaring his horn at that bulwark. Artists must convert their inner chaos into living things of wisdom and beauty, and from that conversion will come their ability to bear life, to brook what Baldwin names “our cruel and unbearable human isolation,” and our “human helplessness.”
“The artist’s responsibility to his society” does not mean that a work of art succeeds only if it scorns social malfeasance. “Social affairs,” Baldwin writes, “are not generally speaking the writer’s prime concern.” He understands the requisite distinction between the rhetorical work of social justice and the imaginative work of literature, and he is often merciless to those who don’t. As critic he refuses to give writers a free pass simply because he is partial to their politics, or homosexuality, or epidermis; he is as hard on Edward Albee or Richard Wright as he is on any straight or Caucasian writer. When it comes to literature, he knows that beauty is more important than message, that message matters not at all if the thing is badly made. “Literature and sociology,” he writes in Notes of a Native Son, “are not one and the same; it is impossible to discuss them as if they were.”
Addressing Wright’s Native Son in 1961, he fired the shots that nearly sank their friendship: “It seems to me that where the polemic is most strong, the novel is least true; and, conversely, that the real fury of the novel tends to complicate and compromise and finally, indeed, to invalidate the novelist’s social and political attitudes.” Writing about Maxim Gorky and his imitators in 1947, he is unapologetic on this front: “Regardless of how well they succeed as outraged citizens, they are incomplete as artists,” and that’s precisely what he thinks of Native Son: incomplete art. Wright helped to get Baldwin’s career started, and so he never fully forgave Baldwin for his inspired brazenness in attacking Native Son, though I suspect that much of Wright’s dismay came from the blaringly obvious fact that, line for line, Baldwin is a better writer. Line for line, Baldwin is a better writer than almost everybody.
For Baldwin, the prose is the point; the prose is all. Here he is reviewing a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson in 1948: “The most enduring delight offered by Stevenson is contained in his prose; he could write superbly well, a virtue for which we should all be grateful now that the clotheshorse, the fisherman, and nymphomaniac have been equipped with typewriters and entered the world of letters.” Baldwin wields a fierce critical acuity and is punishing to a degree we today are much too delicate to endure. Reviewing a forgettable book (“progressive fiction concerning the unhappy South”) in 1948: “Novels and novelists of this genre serve no purpose whatever . . . except to further complicate confusion.” His view of the criminally overrated James M. Cain? “What, after all, is one to say about such persistent aridity, such manifest nonsense? Mr. Cain is no novelist . . . He writes with the stolid, humorless assurance of the American self-made man.” Sinclair Lewis’s Kingsblood Royal is “a lugubrious, sentimental nightmare . . . ill-tempered, tasteless, condescending . . . utterly without significance.” On Chester Himes’s novel Lonely Crusade: “The most uninteresting and awkward prose I have read in recent years. . . . Some of the worst writing on this side of the Atlantic.” On Erskine Caldwell’s novel The Sure Hand of God in 1947: “This, Caldwell’s twenty-third volume, is almost impossible to review, largely, I suspect, because it is almost impossible to take it seriously. One wonders why it was done at all.”
This is not savagery for the sake of itself, but a critic in revolt against what he calls the “debasement of literary standards,” a critic in practiced control of his good taste. For Baldwin, “the ability to write a sentence,” as he calls it, is no paltry feat. And this remains the chief value of James Baldwin, his intensity of intellect and imagination put on the page with rare powers of seduction, with that frightful Baldwinian eloquence: the dialectical tenor of his prose, its easeful way with itself, those pregnant digressions and detours, the delivery unobtrusively sermonic. Baldwin’s prose takes its time: a high-purchase prose that sizes up its target, grabs it, shakes it, refuses to release it. His style thinks; not all style does. He is everywhere unfailingly vivid with articulation. With Baldwin in your hands you are a guest of prose in the process of discovering itself while also proclaiming that it knows precisely what it’s doing, exactly what it thinks: prose in the process of becoming permanent knowledge. It does not hedge; it does not pander. It is unafraid of what it knows.
Here’s a single sentence from The Devil Finds Work that appears after he speaks of having been “bull-whipped” through the Bible as a teen, “a forced march” through the Psalms of David, the Book of Job, “the arrogant and loving Isaiah, the doomed Ezekiel, and the helplessly paranoiac Saint Paul”:
For, I was on Job’s side, for example, though He slay me, yet will I trust Him, and I will maintain mine own ways before Him—You will not talk to me from the safety of your whirlwind, never—and yet something in me, out of the unbelievable pride and sorrow and beauty of my father’s face, caused me to understand—I did not understand, perhaps I still do not understand, and never will—caused me to begin to accept the fatality and the inexorability of that voice out of the whirlwind, for if one is not able to live with so crushing and continuing a mystery, one is not able to live.
Such a long sentence put down by a lesser pen would lurch and trip over its own rhythm, and many clauses would have tons of trouble finding the thread after four dashes. There’s a startling confidence and conviction unleashed in Baldwin’s prose, an earned impudence balanced by tenderness, a union of erudition and emotion unpolluted by the sentimental. (Baldwin detested the sentimental.) Hear the bite in “You will not talk to me,” a bite that owes something to Donne’s first “Holy Sonnet” (“Except Thou rise and for Thine own work fight”). Hear the wounded bafflement in “perhaps I still do not understand,” followed by the nonnegotiable sophistication of “if one is not able to live with so crushing and continuing a mystery, one is not able to live.”
When blurbists and reviewers task themselves with praising a writer’s prose, they normally rely on the prefab term “poetic,” or “lyrical.” That’s nonsense: if prose is poetry it is not prose. Baldwin’s prose indeed has melodic rhythms but they are the natural rhythms of the prose he spoke: the oratorical lilts he picked up in that Harlem church with his stepfather. Langston Hughes saw how Baldwin “uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing,” and Harold Bloom makes a similar point in saying that Baldwin’s “rhetorical power” derives from “a judicious blend of excess and restraint.”
Excess and restraint, yes, but also sensitivity and ego. If most serious writers compose from a cocktail three-fifths ego and two-fifths sensitivity, for Baldwin those fractions are reversed, and that reversal is part of his fluent classiness and charm. If it’s impossible not to feel a towering affection and admiration for him, that’s partly because he was literary and religious before he was political, which is to say that he was from the beginning committed to the eternal and its language. Politics for Baldwin was an obligation—and he engaged it more effectively than almost any other American writer—but literature was a necessity. His tremendous worth goes beyond his hour’s prevailing pieties. “The only word for me, when the chips are down,” he writes in 1963, “is that I am an artist,” because artists “are finally the only people who know the truth about us.” Writing well contains its own radical truth. In his biography of Baldwin, David Leeming mentions that at the peak of Baldwin’s political activism, he was “a guru-prophet who could do no wrong.” But James Baldwin wanted to be something else, and we can be grateful, always, that he was: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”
—Poets & Writers, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017