James Baldwin
-1943-1987-
James Baldwin, an African American writer, is noted for his novels on sexual and personal identity, and sharp essays on the civil rights struggle in the United States. In Baldwin's career, he constructed a body of work that entitles him to be known as one of the most influential African-American writers of his time. In his career, he wrote three plays, a children's storybook, and a book of short stories. He gained fame with his first novel, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (1953), a story of hidden sins, guilt, and religious torments. In this and subsequent works, Baldwin fused autobiographical material with analysis of social injustice and prejudices. He pushed the bounds, of which was uncommon for many writers of his time to do and be an African-American writer (Nichols 678).
Born
in Harlem, New York City, as the son of a domestic worker, James Baldwin
grew up in the most worst of ways, not to mention the fact that he
never knew his real father. When James was three, his mother married a
factory worker, a hard and cruel man, who also was storefront preacher.
James adopted the surname of Baldwin from his stepfather, who died
eventually in a mental hospital in 1943. In his childhood Baldwin was a
voracious reader, cramming in a bit of adventure here and there as he
pleased. When he was about twelve his first story appeared in a church
newspaper. After graduation from
high school, he worked in several ill-paid jobs and started his literary
apprenticeship. Apprenticeship with whom is not known, other than the
fact that he did take some type of apprenticeship.
"And
it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my
father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of
his eldest son, I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had
been central to my father's vision; very well, life seemed to be saying,
here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the
real thing comes along. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father
for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When
his life had ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in anew
way, to be apprehensive about my own."
(from Notes of a Native Son, 1955)
James Baldwin began writing full-time in the 1940s. His first book about the store-front churches in Harlem, with the photographer Theodore Pelatowski, did not gain much success. In 1945 he had his first encounter with the FBI, in Woodstock, where he was living in a cabin in the woods. He was interrogated by two men about a deserter. Baldwin had met him at a party, very briefly, and gave the agents the name, Teddy. Afterwards Baldwin said it felt like being gang-raped, "but they made me hate them, too, with a hatred like hot ice..." (from The Devil Finds Work, 1976)
"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world
into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the
cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to
support it." (Baldwin in Collected Essays, 1998)
Although
publishers rejected his work, Baldwin's book reviews and essays in The
New Leader, The Nation, Commentary, and Partisan
Review, together with the help of Richard Wright, won him a
Rosenwald Fellowship in 1948. Baldwin's strained relations with his
stepfather, problems over sexual identity, suicide of a friend, and
racism drove him in 1948 to Paris and London. During this period Baldwin
finished the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain and wrote the play
THE AMEN CORNER (1955). He lived in Europe ten years, mainly in Paris
and Istanbul, and later spent long periods in New York. In 1957 he
returned to the U.S. in order to become involved in the Southern school
desegregation struggle.
Go Tell It on
the Mountain was based on the author's experiences
as a teenage preacher in a small church. Baldwin had found release from
his poor surroundings through a Pentecostal church. He was converted at
age fourteen and served in the church as a minister for three years.
Baldwin depicted two days in the life of the Grimes family. The 14-year-
old John is a good student, religious, and sensitive. "Everyone had
always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his
father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about
it, had come to believe it himself." He has a long series of
conflicts with his brutal stepfather, Gabriel, a preacher, who had
fathered an illegitimate child in his youth. His mother has her own
secrets. John's spiritual awakening unites the family but only
superficially - John becomes ready to carry his own weight.
Feelings
of strangeness and helpless anger troubled Baldwin during his years in
Europe. In an essay, 'Stranger in the Village' (1953), he depicts his
visit to a tiny Swiss village. He realizes that the people of the
village cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere
in the world. The children consider him an exotic rarity and shout Neger!
Neger! in the streets without being aware of his reaction under
the smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you routine. Despite the saluts and bonsoirs, which Baldwin changed with his neighbors, he also sees
in their eyes paranoiac malevolence - there is no European innocence,
and the ideas which American beliefs are based on, originated from
Europe. "For this village brings home to me this fact: that there
was a day, and not really a very distant day, when Americans were
scarcely Americans at all but discontented Europeans, facing a great
unconquered continent and strolling, say, into a marketplace and seeing
black men for the first time."
In
Baldwin's second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM (1956), the theme was a man's
struggle with his homosexuality. David, the narrator, tells his story on
a single night. He is a young, bisexual American, Giovanni is his
Italian lover, who is to be executed as a murderer, and Hella his
would-be wife. "But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring
posts, their lovers and friends, anymore than they can invent their
parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great
difficulty is to say Yes to life." NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME (1962), a
collections of essays, explored among others black-white relations in
the U.S., William Faulkner's views on segregation, and Richard Wright's
work. Wright had encouraged Baldwin when he was an aspiring writer but
they never became close friends.
The
book became a bestseller as THE FIRE NEXT TIME (1963), in which the
author appraised the Black Muslim (Nation of Islam) movement, and warned
that violence would result if white America does not change its
attitudes toward black Americans. Baldwin's reports on the civil rights
activities of the 1960s made him special target of the U.S. Federal
Bureau of Investigation, that alone accumulated a 1750-page file on him.
In the title essay of NOTES OF A NATIVE SON (1955) Baldwin took examples
from his own family and the Harlem riot of 1943 to describe the
experience of growing up black in America. ANOTHER COUNTRY (1962), a
novel, was criticized for its thin characters. The protagonist is a
black jazz drummer, who kills himself in despair after disappointments
in love and life.
TELL ME HOW
LONG THE TRAIN'S BEEN GONE (1968) was according to Mario Puzo "a
simpleminded, one-dimensional novel with mostly cardboard
characters" (The
New York Times, June 23, 1968). Again Baldwin had an artist as the
protagonist: he is now Leo Proudhammer, a famous actor. Leo's early
years in Harlem are depicted in flashbacks. He shares in Greenwich
Village a living space with a white, unmarried couple, Barbara and
Jerry. Leo and Barbara become lovers but ultimately Leo gains a new life
through his love for a young black militant named Christopher, a Malcolm
X-like figure.
"Joyce
is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be the nightmare
from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history
is trapped in them."
(from 'Stranger in the Village')
After the
assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 and drawbacks in
civil-rights movement, Baldwin started bitterly to acknowledge that
violence may be the only route to racial justice. Some optimism about
peaceful progress would later return, but in the early 1970s he also
suffered from writer's block. In a review of Alex Haley's novel Roots Baldwin looked the work through the possibilities of a presidential
election year and stated that "the black people of this country
bear a mighty responsibility--which, odd as it may sound, is nothing
new--and face an immediate future as devastating, though in a different
way, as the past which has led us here: I am speaking of the beginning
of the end of the black Diaspora, which mean that I am speaking of the
beginning of the end of the world as we have suffered it until now"
(The New York Times, September 26, 1976). IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK
(1974) showed Baldwin's artistic renewal in a moving and poetic love
story of a young talented sculptor, Alonzo Hunt, called Fonny, and his
pregnant girlfriend, Tish, the narrator. Fonny is twenty-two, Tish is
nineteen. He is accused of a rape, but he is innocent, and Tish
struggles to get him free. Baldwin emphasized the importance of family
bonds and the simple power of love as a means of survival.
Music,
which played a minor role in Go Tell It on the Mountain, moved to
the fore in JUST ABOVE MY HEAD (1979), Baldwin's sixth and longest
novel. It focused on the lives of a group of friends, who start out
preaching and singing in Harlem churches. Among the central characters
is Arthur Montana, a gospel singer. Arthur's story, the decline of his
career, is told by his brother Hall, whose balanced middle-class life is
far from the religious turmoil of the Grimes family. African American
music in general influenced deeply Baldwin, which is seen also from the
titles of his books and their allusions to traditional African American
songs. EVIDENCE OF THE THINGS SEEN (1983) was an account of unsolved
murder of 28 black children in Atlanta in 1980 and 1981. The work,
written mostly as an assignment for Playboy, again disappointed
the critics.
In
1983 Baldwin became Five College Professor in the Afro-American Studies
department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He spent his
latter years in St. Paul de Vence on the Riviera, France, where he died
of stomach cancer on November 30, 1987.
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