IMAGINE: It is 1947, late autumn. You are twenty-three years old. You are black. You are living in New York’s Greenwich Village. You work at a small Caribbean restaurant on MacDougal Street called Calypso. You wait tables. You have worked laying railroad tracks in New Jersey. You hated the job. You hate segregated life and the indignities to which you were subjected on top of your hardscrabble existence. You cannot afford to go to college. You must earn money to send home to your large, impoverished family up in Harlem and to survive. People say you look about fifteen years old. You have interesting friends, paramount among them being the African-American painter Beauford Delaney, worldly and wise. He takes a special interest in you. He is your mentor. A surrogate father. (Your father died in 1943.) You will later write of Delaney, “He opened the unusual door” for you. Delaney introduces you to the writer Henry Miller. At the restaurant you meet Paul Robeson and Burt Lancaster and Eartha Kitt and C. L. R. James and so many others. You become good friends with a young, weird, wild, beautiful midwesterner enthralled by the possibilities of Method acting. His name is Marlon Brando. He is not your lover, but he will remain a lifelong friend.
In this exciting Manhattan Village you meet a lot of politically noisy, rambunctious, revolutionary, bohemian, fun-loving types, people who follow socialist ideals, Trotsky and the like, but also you meet musicians, singers, theater people of all stripes, public intellectuals, writers and editors at places like The Nation, the Partisan Review, the New Leader, Commentary, people like Randall Jarrell and Philip Rahv. You get a job as a messenger for a left-leaning newspaper, PM. The editor of the New Leader, Sol Levitas, takes a liking to you. He knows you’ve been working on a novel, Crying Holy—no, you’ve changed the name to In My Father’s House by now. Levitas suggests you try your hand at writing book reviews. It will give you discipline, he says.
Your first review, of a collection of short stories by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, is published in the April 12, 1947, issue of The Nation. You write that Gorky is “far from a careful writer and by no means a great one. He is almost always painfully verbose and frequently threatens to degenerate into simple propaganda.” The review is somewhat brutal; yet you go on to praise Gorky for his “rare sympathy for people,” and further, you chastise “present-day realistic novelists” for their lack of sympathy, for failing to see “the unpredictability and the occasional and amazing splendor of the human being.” You end your first review, which has a somewhat sermonic tone, on the word “salvation.”
IMAGINE: At twenty-three, so much of the James Baldwin the world will come to admire and heed and laud and consider as indispensable was already well formed.
Later that year, in November, in another review of Gorky, of his novel Mother, Baldwin writes:
Art, to be sure, has its roots in the lives of human beings: the weakness, the strength, the absurdity. I doubt that it is limited to our comrades; since we have discovered that art does not belong to what was once the aristocracy, it does not therefore follow that it has become the exclusive property of the common man—which abstraction, by the way, I have yet to meet. Rather, since it is involved with all of us, it belongs to all of us, and this includes our foes, who are as desperate and as vicious and as blind as we are and who can only be as evil as we are ourselves.
He is now only twenty-four; yet the elevated diction, the preoccupation with societal ethics, the syntactical willingness to allow his thoughts to unfurl and take up space, majestically, as they precess toward his hermeneutical ends—looking back, it all feels rather like Athena bursting forth from her daddy’s head, fully made.
Yet, though Baldwin was certainly precocious, he had earned his world vision and his eloquence, as he would go on to essentially document. Rather than springing forth from his stepfather’s brow, he instead wrestled his very gift away from the disapproving Reverend David Baldwin, who saw nothing but ruination in young Jimmy’s fascination with the secular world and with art. It was a fraught relationship, accompanied by severe discipline, harsh beatings, verbal abuse, but also tinged with what Baldwin himself would call love but locked up in a man who did not know how, or who was afraid, to show it.
By the time of his first publication James Baldwin was already onto his second, or even third, life.
But of course the fact that he could be such a powerful writer, against such powerful odds, at such a young age, seems to make sense, in retrospect.
His mother, Berdis Emma Jones, had come to New York from Maryland, a young woman. A failed relationship left her with a child. By the time James was three, in 1927, she had wed a Baptist minister turned Pentecostal, David Baldwin, originally from Louisiana. They would have eight children together.
Their life in Harlem, at the height of the Great Depression, was a constant struggle. David worked in factories, when he could find work; but he also continued preaching in storefront churches. Berdis worked cleaning houses and as a laundress. It fell to young James to help with his brothers and sisters.
The world of literature came knock-knock-knocking on James Baldwin’s door early: Reading and rereading Uncle Tom’s Cabin before he was ten. Discovering the novels of Charles Dickens at around the same time. The Schomburg Library on 135th Street, which he seemed to haunt when not baby-sitting his siblings. Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he would study with Countee Cullen (“To make a poet black, and bid him sing!”), by then the author of two volumes of poetry. Surely, for Baldwin, already the idea of being a writer, for a black man, was a tangible, possible thing.
Then, 1938, simultaneously: Fireside Pentecostal Assembly and DeWitt Clinton High School. Through one door he was learning to “walk holy,” thus becoming a young minister wielding the power of the Word from the pulpit with the sonorous cadences of the King James Bible and with the force of an Old Testament prophet; through the other door—at a school considered by many to have been among the best in the country—he was experiencing another other world of words, as a short-story writer, playwright, editor, critic.
To be sure, Baldwin gives us vivid portraits of the pressure cooker in which he stewed—not only in his virtuoso first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), but later in literally scores of autobiographical essays, again and again, revisiting that existential struggle he faced, like Saint Augustine or John Donne, warring against visions of the sacred and the profane, fighting to become himself, to find himself. But even with those great testaments, which seem to make his emergence as a literary maven seem inevitable, to clothe his history in Myth, there yet remains an impenetrable mystery, still, surrounding James Baldwin, created in the quintessence of a disadvantaged childhood—almost like that of a character from the very Dickens novels he loved so much—rising up, phoenix-like, on the wings of a literary archangel.
One thinks of Aristotle’s admonition that in a well-made play a probable impossibility is always preferable to an improbable possibility, such is the narrative conundrum that is James Arthur Baldwin. Not that it is improbable that a young black man should struggle out of such unforgiving circumstances to achieve literary fame and fortune—literally hundreds of young men and women have accomplished just that—but it is the staggering quality and sheer magnitude of Baldwin’s achievements that beggar the imagination. Musical prodigies, though few and far between, are numerous and sundry; literary prodigies are rarely ever heard from, and the few who shine forth tend to burn out quite young.
Any new glimpse into the probable impossibility that is James Baldwin is a welcome treat and treasure.
As a companion volume to James Baldwin: Collected Essays (1998), the Library of America’s edition of his collected nonfiction, these heretofore uncollected occasional writings give us a different lens through which to view Baldwin’s artistry. A collection of snapshots. A sketchbook. An omnium-gatherum of those ideas he revisited most often. A GPS map of the geography of his mind’s progress. It brings together an eclectic mix of reviews, essays, and public letters from 1947 to 1985 that charts his incredible passage.
The trajectory of James Baldwin’s life has the quality of epic saga. He fled racially intolerant America for France in 1948. He had already become acquainted with Richard Wright, by far the most successful and famous black novelist in America at the time. Wright had intervened on Baldwin’s behalf with his publisher, Harper and Row, to obtain an option for the unfinished first novel. But that novel would not come together. Now in war-scarred France Baldwin tried to try again, yet he quickly found himself in even worse circumstances than he had faced back in his homeland. No money, ill health, and, much to his chagrin, racist encounters with the French police led him to near despair. The famous American colony of intellectuals and artists and writers (now including Richard Wright) soon grew peevish with him. Fortunately for Baldwin, his young Swiss lover, Lucien Happersberger, with the help of his father, was able to spirit Baldwin away to an Alpine village, Loèche-les-Bains, which Baldwin would later write about with great affection in his essay “A Stranger in the Village.” There he would regain his health, his optimism, his creative spark, and, to the gut-bucket blues of Bessie Smith, he would complete the novel now called Go Tell It on the Mountain. He was twenty-nine when Alfred A. Knopf published the book, to great acclaim. This was the story he had been struggling to tell, of a large family in a small Harlem apartment, of a loving mother, of an unreasonable minister father, of communing with the Holy Spirit, of becoming fascinated with the wide world.
His second novel seemed initially to hit a roadblock—a brief, lyrical novel written from the point of view of a white man in love with another white man, an Italian named Giovanni—which led Baldwin’s publisher to abandon the now-too-controversial-to-handle young black writer. In the meantime, Beacon Press brought out a collection of his essays, often written to keep body and soul together while he completed his first novel. That collection, Notes of a Native Son (1955), drew even greater attention to James Baldwin, marking him as a skilled essayist and thinker and commentator on the racial scene. The volume contained seminal essays for which he would become known for decades to come, including the title essay, in which he artfully came to some reconciliation with his late stepfather and somehow spun that heartache with larger events dealing with race and politics and humanity. There was that style, part sermon, part nineteenth-century mandarin (Henry James, about whom he had written and felt a certain kinship as a fellow expatriate, now being a profound influence on his prose).
The next year saw the publication of the new novel, Giovanni’s Room, which miraculously survived the firestorm of homophobia and firmly established Baldwin as a hot novelist of note, an important new voice.
Thus began over a decade of a rather heady and tumultuous life, dominated not only by tremendous literary production, but by a hands-on involvement in the struggle for civil rights for black folk, particularly in the South, and throughout America. He was commissioned by top-flight national magazines—Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy—to go to North Carolina and Tennessee and Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia, foreign lands for him, to write about those increasingly heated battles. There was something about his background—this Northern child of Holy Roller Harlem, this American who had fled racist America for France only to encounter another racism, this gay man (the ultimate outsider)—that gave James Baldwin not only the insight, but a language and a moral vision inflected by the righteous rhythms of Protestantism, that made his writings like none other. The essays collected in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961) and later in the hugely successful The Fire Next Time, the 1963 account of the Nation of Islam that turned into a national sermon on race, all served to transform Baldwin into something more than a writer for the American public and the world at large—if the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was the civil rights movement’s Moses, James Baldwin had become its Jeremiah, despite his protestations of speaking for no one but himself.
Of course Baldwin considered himself first and foremost a novelist. Nineteen sixty-two’s Another Country represented a maturation that seemed to represent the fruition of all his literary ambitions. A dramatic exploration of love and race in its many manifestations—black man with white woman, white man with black woman, black man with white man—the book proved to be even more controversial than Giovanni’s Room. It was banned in many states yet became one of the best-selling paperback novels of 1963.
Radio, television, far-flung speaking engagements, interviews galore, and a taste for the high life—Baldwin was now leading as hectic a life as any million-seller recording artist, perhaps even more so. The cover of Time magazine. A place on the rostrum at the 1963 March on Washington. This period was a lengthy crescendo that resonated throughout the 1960s.
But the 1960s were both halcyon and hell for Baldwin. More literary successes followed: a Broadway play, Blues for Mister Charlie (1964); a collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man (1965); another best-selling novel, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968). And also a time for assassinations: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr.—men he knew, men he considered friends. He even had a problematic relationship with Robert F. Kennedy. The weight of all this bloodshed, and a lifestyle that seemed to be spiraling out of control, led him to go into what looked more and more like an unofficial exile, first to Turkey and later to the south of France, where throughout the 1970s he held court in a three hundred-year-old farmhouse in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, rather like an oracle frequently visited by acolytes and pilgrims and admirers from far and wide.
Here’s the thing about James Baldwin’s prose:
As noted earlier, from the start, he was audacious in his love for complex sentences; one might say even fearless in the way he deployed the English language. Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, among English-language writers, dared put so much demand on the language. To watch them create a sentence is often like watching a high-wire act. Death-defying sentences. Lush, romantic sentences. Sentences that dared to swallow the entire world. These writers were undaunted by outrageous complexity, clauses, dependent and independent, modified, interrupted, periodic. They trusted in the force of their meaning and their music (and the rules of good grammar) to carry the feat. But the aforementioned writers almost always saved their linguistic pyrotechnics for fiction: Baldwin unleashed his most baroque prose in his nonfiction, something that not only set him apart from his contemporaries, gave him a singular voice, but also allowed him to create thoughts of great nuance and shading and meaning. Reading a Baldwin sentence can feel like recreating thought itself. One has to take hands off the rudder and trust the river of thought as it flows. Here is a sentence from a 1967 review of Elia Kazan’s novel The Arrangement:
This is not the official version of American history, but that it very nearly sums it up can scarcely be doubted by anyone with the courage to look into the faces one encounters all over this land: who listens to the voices, hearing incessantly the buried uneasiness, the bewilderment, the unadmitted despair, hearing the arrogant, jaunty, fathomless, utterly astounding ignorance; a cultivated ignorance of all things public, and a terrified ignorance of all things private; translating itself, visibly, hourly, into a hatred of all that is strange or vivid—and what is vivid is always strange; into a hatred, at last, of life.
I do not mean to suggest that Baldwin was totally given over to highly complex prose, that he overindulged in ornate rhetoric. In fact this book contains fewer rococo passages than in some of his better-known work. (See The Fire Next Time.) Rather, I hope to underscore Baldwin’s uncanny mastery of the English language; how, like his contemporary Miles Davis on the trumpet, his skill allowed him to go any place he wanted, with deceptive ease. Like magic.
But above all—and this cannot be stressed strongly enough—meaning was always utmost. Despite a highly evolved aesthetic sensibility, despite a punishingly high level of artistic standards, Baldwin’s goal was always to communicate, not to show off. George Orwell would definitely approve of his overall strategies. For him the medium was not the message; the message was always the message.
It is easy to say that Baldwin’s main message was racial equality. Surely the topic flows through his work more than it ebbs. Yet one makes a grave mistake in pigeonholing James Baldwin’s worldview so narrowly, for throughout this miscellany, though racial topics and racial politics are often the touchstone, his true themes are more in line with the early church fathers, with Erasmus of Rotterdam, with the great Western philosophers, with theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and James Cone. And though it is too broad—if not useless—to say his true topic is humanity, it is useful to see how, no matter his topic, how often his writing finds some ur-morality upon which to rest, how he always sees matters through a lens of decency, how he writes with his heart as well as with his head. Baldwin left the pulpit at sixteen, but he never stopped preaching.
This book has been organized into Baldwin’s essays, profiles, reviews, letters, introductions, and a short story.
The reviews show a writer of broad tastes; a writer always agile and with a rapier wit, sometimes feeling a bit sharper than necessary, but always hitting his mark. Aside from Gorky, he reviewed biographies, the fiction of Erskine Caldwell, Catholic philosophy, a novel by Mississippi newspaperman Hodding Carter, and a late novel by James M. Cain, among others. There is a fascinating 1949 piece he wrote for Commentary, “Too Late, Too Late,” in which he rounds up seven books about black Americans, including John Hope Franklin’s classic From Slavery to Freedom. Baldwin is rather harsh on all of them—bewilderingly so:
And the very moment these questions are asked, this long view—which is demanded most vociferously of Negroes—emerges as something less lofty; comes close, indeed, to being nothing more than a system of justification. The American need for justification is a good deal stronger than the American sense of time—which began, as we are inclined to believe, with the Stars and Stripes. Thus, not even Mr. Rose’s careful and comprehensive study escapes the pit into which all of these books fall: they record the facts, but they cannot probe the immense, ambiguous, uncontrollable effect. The full story of white and black in this country is more vast and shattering than we would like to believe and, like an unhindered infection in the body, it has the power to make our whole organism sick.
Truth to tell, James Baldwin comes across in almost all his reviews as a pretty strict and unforgiving taskmaster. This revelation should come as no surprise to students of Baldwin, who notoriously excoriated Native Son—written by his chief patron, Richard Wright—an act that broke their friendship for the rest of their lives. And there was also the review of Raintree County, by Ross Lockridge Jr., which called the book phony, among other select qualifications. The author committed suicide shortly before the review was published; Baldwin qualified his original review by essentially saying the book was still no good.
Baldwin’s letters, on the other hand, strike a more complex mélange of emotions. Indeed, his tone is often fiery, as in his 1970 open letter to activist Angela Davis, who had just been imprisoned. (“One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles.”) His tone is militant, as condemnatory toward the U.S.A. as ever; yet his tenderness toward Davis and her comrades elicits a forlorn sense of longing.
His 1968 essay “Black Power,” written in response to activist Stokely Carmichael’s 1967 book of the same name, feels even more like a plea. In a 1967 letter to Freedomways, he takes issue with public calls for blacks to embrace anti-Semitism, saying that black folk have no use of such ancient evil.
An arresting sequence of letters, published together in Harper’s in 1963, strikes yet another note, showing us a young James Baldwin on the road, from September 1961 to February 1962. Paris. Israel. Turkey. Switzerland. Here we see glimpses of a much more idealistic young man, an admixture of hope and light and wonder and concern for his loved ones, tempered by discomfort and a clear eye cast toward the injustice he encounters:
“Oh, What a Beautiful City!” Well, that’s the way Jerusalem makes one feel. I stood today in the upper room, the room where Christ and his disciples had the Last Supper, and I thought of Mahalia and Marian Anderson and “Go Down, Moses” and of my father and of that other song … And here I am, far from ready, in one of the homelands which has given me my identity and on my way to another.
The forewords and prefaces Baldwin writes are an interesting grab bag, written largely by his goodwill and affection and sense of fellowship toward fellow writers. A generosity of spirit. An odd kiss to a brother in the foreword to Bobby Seale’s 1978 autobiography (“For it is that tremendous journey which Bobby’s book is about: the act of assuming and becoming oneself”). A valentine to a book he recognized as an instant classic, Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner, about his own Harlem. But that tone differs in a brief but powerful preface to The Negro in New York. Somehow he links the Dutch to the Industrial Revolution and then to the plight of black folk in present-day Harlem—there is a wicked humor afoot in his anger, bracing and ruefully amusing.
As fascinating and piercing and blood-quickening and exciting as these shorter pieces are, James Baldwin truly shines in the longer form. It is thrilling to see so many of these largely forgotten pieces reintroduced into wider circulation. Many are positively breathtaking. Moreover, my earlier point about Baldwin’s wide and diverse interests is here proven. He writes about literature; he writes about Turkey and Africa and Europe; he writes about music; he writes about the American language; he writes about theater and boxing and child rearing; and yes, he writes at great length about those matters with which he shall always be associated: race, the American empire, justice, and James Baldwin.
A standout piece is one he wrote in 1962, where he comes as close to writing a manifesto for his art as any place else (“As Much Truth As One Can Bear”). Here he takes to task his literary predecessors Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos: “One must be willing—indeed, one must be anxious—to locate, precisely, that American morality of which we boast.”
“Of the Sorrow Songs: The Cross of Redemption” is a lyric praise-song to great African-American song: “It is out of this, and much more than this, that black American music springs. This music begins on the auction block… Music is our witness, and our ally. The ‘beat’ is the confession which recognizes, changes, and conquers time.”
Here, in this volume, are three companion pieces to “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?,” the essay he wrote in 1979 and which is still widely read today. “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” “On Language, Race, and the Black Writer,” and “Black English: A Dishonest Argument” will surely be as equally well read and discussed.
Without exaggeration I must say the 1963 piece of reportage “The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston,” about the fabled Chicago prizefight, is easily among the best writing Baldwin ever committed. And no one else could do proper justice to the great Sidney Poitier the way James Baldwin did in Look magazine in July of 1968.
Baldwin made no secret of his deep love for his good buddy the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, immortalized in his oft-reprinted reminiscence, “Sweet Lorraine.” Here are two more paeans to the author of A Raisin in the Sun, one about that play’s bedrock truths, and the other, his 1979 recounting of Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s infamous 1963 meeting in New York with Baldwin, Hansberry, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, and a number of other black activists. This meeting turned into a shouting match recounted in the papers. Sixteen years later, Baldwin’s tone is now wistful, yet piercing, a shot through the heart on many levels.
For years, for some reason, I always thought upon Baldwin’s time during the 1970s as bitter and angry and unhappy. That was the popular narrative that attended him as the Nixon years waned into the Carter years and Ronald Reagan waxed onto the stage. Journalists often quoted the interviews that Baldwin gave in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the height of the Vietnam War and in the wake of so much death and an American landscape pockmarked with riot-ruined cities. Clearly his feelings had been injured by his rejection by youthful groups like the Black Panthers. He came off in the press as an aloof, wealthy old warrior who had left the battlefield, his country forsaken, his ministry of love turned into one of bitterness.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s memorable essay/interview simply called “An Interview with Josephine Baker and James Baldwin,” written in 1973, did not see print until 1985, and it told a slightly different story. In truth, the piece does end with Baldwin predicting “apocalypse” for America. But again, this was 1973. However, the image one comes away with is one of Baldwin communing with the great Josephine Baker, who, oddly enough, had a much more sanguine attitude toward her faraway country. The two veterans reminisce and a young Skip Gates leaves with a renewed sense of the possible, not only for himself but for his hero, James Baldwin.
Baldwin would go on to write some of his best and some of his less good work: Just Above My Head, his last novel, and The Devil Finds Work, a funky combination of memoir and movie criticism, representing the best; The Evidence of Things Not Seen, his swan song, about the Atlanta child murders, being among his least successful.
Yet life was rich, despite what the media would have led us to believe. Baldwin would begin teaching in the 1980s, in America, where he wound up influencing a number of young African-American women who would go on to important literary careers, one even winning a Pulitzer Prize.
As I have traveled the country in the last several months, back into the fall of 2008, talking to students about the work of James Baldwin and African America, I can always count on one question coming from young people for whom the civil rights movement is a collection of pictures in a textbook, and, if they are lucky, perhaps a few good films about heroic black folk singing “We Shall Overcome.”
What, they ask, would James Baldwin think of Barack Obama?
Now I can tell them I think I know. In a 1961 speech for the Liberation Committee for Africa, Baldwin wrote:
Bobby Kennedy recently made me the soul-stirring promise that one day—thirty years, if I’m lucky—I can be President too. It never entered this boy’s mind, I suppose—it has not entered the country’s mind yet—that perhaps I wouldn’t want to be. And in any case, what really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro “first” will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.
And there’s the rub. He goes on to say that in order for such a seemingly unimaginable event to occur, first the United States must be “revised”; that the then-so-called “Negro problem” would have to be first reinvented and reseen as the problem of the ruling classes (“The confusion in this country that we call the Negro problem has nothing to do with the Negroes”); that every switch must be flipped; and then and only then could he see a black man in the White House.
Whether or not America has actually undergone the total revision Baldwin outlines in his peroration, and throughout his works—now more accessible and complete to the eager reader with this timely volume—remains an open question. Yet I’m certain he’d acknowledge that the nearly fifty years between then and now have brought us closer to that Braver Newer World. Barack Obama may not be presiding over a colorblind, gender-equal, economically fair, same-sex-love-affirming, environmentally clean, disease-cleansed, morally upright America—I’m sure even Baldwin would eschew that ultimate possibility as a bit too utopian—but I’m sure he’d believe the possibilities for his country were looking up since he wrote, in 1961:
What can we do? … I don’t know how it will come about, but I know that no matter how it comes about, it will be bloody; it will be hard. I still believe that we can do with this country something that has not been done. We are misled here because we think of numbers. You don’t need numbers; you need passion. And this is proven by the history of the world.