The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin
An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he’d ever write something without a message. “No writer who ever lived,” Baldwin said, “could have written a line without a message.” This is true. People write because they have something to say. Baldwin had something to say, and he spent his life saying it. But many who thought they got his message didn’t get it at all.
Baldwin was high-strung and emotionally labile. He wasn’t exactly charismatic—there was a strangeness about him which he did nothing to conceal—but he was magnetic. The poet Richard Howard described him as a “rather silly, giddy, predatory fellow who was extremely unattractive-looking. There’s a famous eighteenth-century person who used to say, ‘I can talk my face away in twenty minutes.’ And Jimmy could do that.” He put his hands on you. He looked you in the eye. He poured you another drink. When he gave a lecture, he held the room. He had been a preacher when he was very young, and he knew how to work a congregation.
He could charm, he could engage, and he could also rant. Some people who knew him thought that the ranting was an act, and to some extent it was: it was a calculated way of making a point. He spent the winter of 1961 living in the guesthouse of the novelist William Styron, in Connecticut, while he worked on a novel. “We’d feed him,” Styron remembered, “and he’d come around at night. We’d have these very liberal political people over, and Jimmy . . . used to stand in front of the fireplace and say, ‘Baby, we’re going to burn your motherfucking houses down.’ ” The liberals no doubt loved it. As he no doubt knew they would.
Baldwin did not follow a healthy or a domestically stable life style. He chain-smoked, wrote all night, and drank his way through countless bottles of Johnnie Walker Scotch. He believed in family. He was close to his own, and toward the end of his life he said that not having children was his only regret. But he had numerous casual liaisons, several unrequited crushes, and a few long-term love affairs, all of which ended unhappily. He tried to kill himself at least three times.
Most of his journalism and all his books were published by white editors who did not always share his ideas on race relations. He was naturally fearful, but he was on the road and out in public during a time when people like him, including people he knew, were getting shot. Putting his message out took an enormous physical and psychic toll.
That message was simple. We’re afraid of love, because we’re afraid of exposing our true selves. To manage that fear, we invent meaningless categories—Black, white, homosexual, heterosexual—and “other” the groups we don’t belong to in order to avoid a reckoning with ourselves. In America, this manifests as “the race problem.” Until white Americans—or Americans who “think they are white,” as Baldwin sometimes put it—stop posing as innocents and confront who they are, until the country faces its history, until white people learn to love, there will never be genuine equality.
That’s pretty much all that Baldwin ever said, and he said it over and over in almost every essay, every book, every speech, and every interview. He had no interest in politics in the usual sense; he wasn’t interested in social programs, or civil-rights laws, or the equal-protection clause. If you asked his opinion on those things, he’d politely (usually) change the subject. He was quick, always ready with an answer, and it was always the same answer. William F. Buckley, Jr., was a champion debater at Yale, and fancied himself a forensic maestro; in a famous debate at the Cambridge Union in 1965, Baldwin clobbered him. He carried the room.
But what even sympathetic audiences often failed to grasp—misled, perhaps, by Baldwin’s sermonic style—was that his message wasn’t just hortatory. He meant it literally. He didn’t believe in reform; he believed in revolution. Anything less than a total social reckoning—a complete psychological makeover of white America—was worthless.
This is end-of-days talk. If a total makeover is your goal, then everything is going to fall short. In 1984, reflecting on a career that began in the nineteen-forties, Baldwin judged that although there had been “superficial” changes in race relations, “morally there has been no change at all, and a moral change is the only real one. . . . What has happened, in the time of my time, is the record of my ancestors. No promise was kept with them, no promise was kept with me, nor can I counsel those coming after me, nor my global kinsmen, to believe a word uttered by my morally bankrupt and desperately dishonest countrymen.”
Three years later, he was dead. He was only sixty-three, but he had long since lost his readership. In 1976, the Times’ daily book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt opened a review, “So James Baldwin is still here, still pursuing us, a ghost of 60’s past.” Three years before that, the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., had travelled to France to interview Baldwin for Time. When Gates filed the piece, editors told him the magazine wasn’t interested; Baldwin was “passé.” Just a decade earlier, he’d been on the cover. Even Gates, who’d once found Baldwin inspirational, came to believe that, in trying to keep up with the times, Baldwin had given up his critical independence. He had become an echo. He no longer mattered.
Yet today Baldwin is an icon. He has acquired an aura of infallibility, and critical independence is precisely what he stands for. People who once wrote him off have pivoted. And, if you ask college students now what Black American author they want to read, they don’t say Toni Morrison. They say James Baldwin. What happened?
The consensus formed early that Baldwin, who broke through with his first two novels, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953) and “Giovanni’s Room” (1956), and the essay collections “Notes of a Native Son” (1955) and “Nobody Knows My Name” (1961), was a better essayist than novelist. The novels have their moments, but they have the humorless and fatalistic quality of literary naturalism. They are not books you are eager to get back to. Truman Capote, in a letter to a friend, called Baldwin’s fiction “crudely written and of balls-aching boredom.” Compared with much literary fiction of the time—“Invisible Man,” “The Adventures of Augie March,” “On the Road,” “Lolita,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Rabbit, Run”—Baldwin’s novels are less formally adventurous and far less entertaining.
Still, the early ones were well received. “Giovanni’s Room”—though it’s the story of a love affair between two men, a risqué topic for fiction in 1956—was a critical success, at least among white reviewers. It sold briskly and was a National Book Award finalist. Maybe setting it in Paris made it seem exotic rather than prurient.
The scope of those early novels was narrow, though, and the stories were not anchored in current events. It was with the essay collections that Baldwin caught a wave. The Montgomery bus boycott began in 1955, the battles over school desegregation in 1956, the Southern lunch-counter sit-ins in 1960, the Freedom Rides in 1961. There was something happening here, and, for many white readers, Baldwin was the unfiltered voice of Black experience. He told it like it was.
This is the historical moment—what has been called the “classic phase” of the civil-rights movement, from Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, to the Voting Rights Act of 1965—that Baldwin will forever be a part of. It was a time when a book could make a difference: “The Feminine Mystique,” “Silent Spring,” “The Other America.” Baldwin’s contribution was “The Fire Next Time.” It made a bigger difference than most people think.
Baldwin’s nonfiction is first-person and autobiographical. That was how he established his authority as a “witness” (the term he preferred) to American race relations. He had walked those mean streets. In Harlem, where he was born, and Greenwich Village, where he moved at nineteen, he had known poverty, police brutality, sexual assault, and racial discrimination. He had fled the country, going to Paris in 1948, when he was twenty-four. He did not return until 1957.
Even then, he was semi-expatriated. From 1961 on, he spent more and more time in Istanbul, although he was often in the United States speaking on behalf of the civil-rights movement. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, basically ended that, and in 1970 Baldwin moved to Saint-Paul de Vence, in the South of France, where he lived for the rest of his life. This man who wrote obsessively about America spent half his life elsewhere.
It’s a life appealing to biographers, full of historical incidents and famous names, and featuring a complex, quotable, and slightly otherworldly human being. The first Baldwin biography, “The Furious Passage of James Baldwin,” by Fern Marja Eckman, a reporter at the New York Post, came out in 1966, when its subject was only forty-two. There have been a number since, including, most recently, Douglas Field’s “All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin” (2015), Bill V. Mullen’s “James Baldwin: Living in Fire” (2019), and now Nicholas Boggs’s “Baldwin: A Love Story” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
