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James Baldwin matters. To veteran Baldwin admirers, his renewed prominence comes as a surprise after decades of indifference. This year, in the centenary of his birth in Harlem, Baldwin has seemed to matter more than at any time since his heyday, when he combined the roles of writer and civil rights spokesman. Between 1961 and 1964 he produced three bestselling books — two collections of essays and the novel Another Country — as well as a stylish collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon and a Broadway play. In May 1963, TIME put him on its cover (Martin Luther King had to wait until the following January). Life called him “the monarch of the current literary jungle.”
To be African-American was to be ‘African without any memory and American without any privilege’
Well before the end of the decade, the monarch had been toppled. It was America’s time of assassins, and three civil rights leaders were among the fallen: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and, in 1968, King himself. Baldwin caught the ricochet from each bullet. He suffered a breakdown and returned to France, where he had first blossomed as a writer. The chic Provençal village of Saint-Paul de Vence became his main residence for the rest of his life. By the time of his death in 1987, aged sixty-three, he had retained celebrity status, but his literary standing was much reduced. A visitor to Saint-Paul in 1984 recalls that Baldwin was having difficulty finding a publisher for what would be his final book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, an investigation of the Atlanta child killings that occurred between 1979 and 1980. (The same visitor, invited to read the manuscript, could understand why.)
What has happened to make Baldwin matter so much now? Identity politics is the short answer. His renaissance has its origin in the rise of Queer Studies as an academic discipline in the 1990s, gaining momentum over the past decade from the attention paid to police shootings of young black men in the US. In 2017’s James Baldwin: The FBI File, William J. Maxwell referred to “Born-again Baldwin,” a symbolic figure who has “returned to pre-eminence, unbowed and unwrinkled, reflecting his special ubiquity in the imagination of Black Lives Matter.” The movement cleared space in which Baldwin’s bitter wit could flourish again:
It comes as a great shock around the age of five, six or seven to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance has not pledged allegiance to you… To see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, to realize that the Indians are you
This year, Baldwin has been the subject of panel discussions, conferences, radio programs, walking tours in Istanbul and Paris, exhibitions and other forms of celebration from Harlem to Hackney and Portland to Peckham — where the London Review of Books recently staged a concert in a pop-up venue of the music featured in the fiction. In addition, a clutch of books has been added to the already extensive bibliography. They include On James Baldwin by Colm Tóibín and Douglas Field’s tender memoir Walking in the Dark, a meditation on “James Baldwin, my father, and me.”
Tóibín’s book began as a series of lectures. He is a thoughtful commentator on the novels and essays (there are seven works of fiction in total, and five of non-fiction, not counting posthumous publications), ranging widely in order to establish a context in which Baldwin’s talent may be assessed. The usual names crop up — Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James — as well as some with which Baldwin might have been less familiar: W.B. Yeats, for example, and Roy Campbell. In a discussion of the autobiographical writings of Baldwin and Barack Obama, Tóibín points to a feature they had in common: “Both would discover their own Americanness outside America, Baldwin in France, the home of some of his literary ancestors, Obama in Kenya, the home of his father.” The pairing lends itself to facile comparison, as Tóibín acknowledges, but Baldwin can be relied on for subtlety. He felt little connection to the Africans he encountered in Paris: “We almost needed a dictionary to talk.” To be African-American, he said, was to be “African without any memory and American without any privilege.”
On James Baldwin contains a section on an unusual book published in 1961, Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, in which the author recounted his experience of disguising himself and passing for black. Tóibín wobbles towards anachronistic politically correct disapproval in respect of Griffin’s exploits. He strikes an odd note when suggesting that Griffin would have been better off “asking people and listening to their answers” than indulging in this forerunner of New Journalism. If it was a stunt it was a courageous one — it wouldn’t even get started now — and it furthered public interest in what was turning into a bloody drama. As did Baldwin’s essay collection Nobody Knows My Name, published at the same time. Both books sat on the New York Times bestseller lists for several weeks.
Like Tóibín, Field offers perceptive comments on Baldwin’s language — at its best a blend of instinct and intelligence, controlled by literary judgment. He and Tóibín make frequent reference to Baldwin’s debut essay collection, 1955’s Notes of a Native Son, in which he stated that he wanted “to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.”
It was an admirable resolution, but unforeseeable obstacles lay in its path, arising from the demands of political activism. Fame itself played a part, and exasperation at being categorized by color. For Baldwin, plain “American writer” was good enough. Similar unease came from the unshakable label “gay.” In a late interview with the Village Voice, he repeatedly expressed his “impatience with the term,” until his interviewer (Richard Goldstein) gave in: “I guess I’m imposing these terms on you.” There are many ironies in Baldwin’s career. Two of them concern his most popular novel, Giovanni’s Room: it is “not really a novel about homosexuality,” as he told Goldstein, and it contains no black characters.
Field reached Saint-Paul de Vence long after Baldwin’s death, just before the notorious destruction of the former farmhouse. After scaling the wall, he paid homage to his mentor, an act recorded in Walking in the Dark. The book skillfully entwines various strands. Field outlines Baldwin’s life in Harlem and his difficult relationship with his stepfather. Next to this is the story of Field’s early years in Shropshire, his troubles with his own father, and his developing love for Baldwin. Those narratives are overshadowed by Field senior’s late-stage Alzheimer’s and the author’s responses to it. The father was an awkward man, but a literary one. Field describes him and Baldwin as “my two literary influences.”
In the course of the decade-long revival, there have been studies of Baldwin and the law, Baldwin in the Reagan years, Maxwell’s commentary on the FBI file, a book about Baldwin’s sojourns in Turkey in the 1960s and another on the ill-fated house in Saintt-Paul, to which Baldwin’s heirs lost the title after years of legal wrangling. Continuing the trend towards micro-criticism, OUP has published a slim study by Tom Jenks of a single short story, James Baldwin’s “Sonny Blues.”
None of the books mentioned is by an African-American author. During his high period, Baldwin appealed mainly to middle-class white readers, but a notable feature of the upsurge of interest is that it is largely powered by black activists, academics and younger writers, one of whom styles himself “Son of Baldwin.” It is a remarkable turnaround and deserves proper attention. Several radical figures dismissed and mocked Baldwin in his prime, including Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther party and the poet Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones). Baraka called for someone to turn Baldwin white: “Then the rest of us can get down to the work at hand.” Cleaver’s homophobic abuse in Soul on Ice would be rejected by reputable publishers today.
Baldwin’s relations with the Panthers features in his memoir of the tumultuous years, No Name in the Street, originally published in 1971 and now reissued by Penguin Modern Classics. It shows a hardening of the spirit. Non-violence had not prevented the murder of King nor the Birmingham Sunday School bombing. It failed to protect the bloodied heads of protestors in segregated cafeterias. Who could resist the call of militancy? No Name in the Street finds Baldwin in San Francisco in 1969 with what he calls “the flower children” on one side of the street and members of the Panthers on the other. His attempt to reason his way through this conundrum (a favorite word) is sometimes rambling, often wounded, but always compelling.
It was a journalistic trope of the early 1960s to ask “Nobody knows his name?” and to answer “Well, they do now!” It has come round again. Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind the tendency to blur literary appreciation and what F.R. Leavis called “the history of publicity.” Joseph Conrad’s death occurred on August 3, 1924, the day after Baldwin’s birth, a centennial event that has passed without Heart of Darkness pleasure cruises or Peckham pop-up concerts.
