Arts and Letters

James Arthur Baldwin assumed the privileged and burdened place of a first son when he was born to Berdis Emma Jones Baldwin on the second day of August, 1924, in New York City. The privilege, the burden, and the authority of that position were to inform his whole life and his complete work. It accounts, certainly, not only for the glitter of his intellect and the haste with which he honed it but also for the daring, against mighty odds, to appropriate it, claim it, and protect and defend it. There is an unmistakable hubris in his creativity, a large part of which is courage, responsibility, and the conviction at a very young age that one is able to address and even alter an adult world.

Much critical coin has been made out of the recorded wretchedness of the world he lived in as a child and a young adult. Far too little is made of the nurturing valuable lessons of that world. We read the predictable narrative of a child of the ghetto breaking its grip and becoming, by dint of self-will, the flight from rejection and other people's generosity, a world-known writer quoted, read, and sought after from Atlanta, Georgia, to Paris, from Dakar to Hollywood. We gather, therefore, that his gifts stem from that rejection (social or paternal), a lovelessness; that his power comes from his rage, and that his intelligence was gleaned from the books he read. It may be a way of saying that out of this negative place comes a positive force, so perhaps it is all right to sustain the negative if it has such astonishing results. Perhaps it's all right to enfranchise the suffering rather than the work. It is an equally if not more persuasive idea that Baldwin's persistent talent and his unblinking vision are a consequence of the strength he developed and assumed in a certain kind of environment. It was in his family that he first learned to wrestle, to resist other people's agendas, to give orders, to protect people smaller and younger than he was, to demand, to analyze, to perform, to invent. He was eight years old when he began to write. Perhaps if you have moved adults at fourteen, faced the public and commanded it as a junior preacher at Fireside Pentecostal Church you can begin to write, at seventeen years of age, In My Father's House, which was published as Go Tell It on the Mountain. Perhaps if you have felt the policeman's blows at ten and protected your siblings from age three on, you are made confident enough to accept an invitation and deliver seven book reviews to the New Leader in 1947 when you are twenty-three. Perhaps if you have been told by the world that you have no future, there really is nothing to lose and you create one. One that includes eight novels, among them Another Country, If Beale Street Could Talk, Just Above My Head, Giovanni's Room. A future that includes thirteen nonfiction books such as Nobody Knows My Name, Notes of a Native Son, No Name in the Street, The Fire Next Time, and 102 published articles.

In these beginnings lie both the quest for approval and a disdain of it, both of which must have informed James Baldwin's ambition. There is always something contradictory and ineffable about genius, and while we rank and grade the products, we suspect, sometimes, that is all we can do—otherwise we would be shocked into silence at what Chinua Achebe, in remembering Baldwin, calls "the immensity, the sheer prodigality of endowment.”¹ At the height of his powers, when he was writing from that "endowed" place, Baldwin's prose reveals a fierce, lucid, analytic intelligence expressed in seemingly effortless, classically unadorned yet powerfully imaged language. Principal among his stylistic strategies were the use of the autobiographical “threshing floor,” the telling anecdote, riveting the reader and domesticating abstract ideas. As in the way the postriot streets through which he passed in his father's funeral caravan become prophesy for the culture as well as the riot within the narrator. So effective is his personalized rendering of history, critical judgment frequently penalized him when he chose not to employ that technique. Giovanni's Room, for example, a text called odd, curious, unrelated to his “experience” (except in the most obvious way), by scholars, is pivotal to any understanding of Baldwin's development as a writer, signaling as it does concerns that were with him all of his writing life: the declaration of literary independence from his Black artistic predecessors; problems of being an American in Europe; the despair, the ambivalence, the guilt, and the desire for innocence in the search for what it means to be an American man—and the overwhelming responsibility of love.

His sermonic eloquence, his parallelisms, the physical, tactile matrix of his metaphors, his surgical skill with repetition and alliteration gave his language the hard edge it needed to contain his deep humanity, his profound and, as he put it, “active” love of his country—a love so intense, so enduring it would tolerate no blindness, no lame rationalizing. Like so many writers before him, he never left it alone, never left his country to its own devices. He delineated its conscience and then pricked the very conscience he helped to form. And his love for his people was as bruising as it was limitless. Those who could stand its rigor benefited from it; those who could not took umbrage.

What a writer chooses to write about is no more important than the angle of vision he brings to his subject. At twenty-four James Baldwin chose to write about Harriet Beecher Stowe—from a literary point of view (although it was generally assumed that his point of view was “merely” political). This at a time when Uncle Tom's Cabin had an exclusively political significance in the world of letters but no literary one. Only recently has the work been given the serious scholarship of literary critics that Baldwin gave it forty years ago. His evaluation of his literary antecedents, his peers, his times, were probing encounters with his own demons as well as theirs. Charting his effort to be not “merely a Negro, or merely a Negro writer,”² to enter a previously uninhabited place for an Afro-American writer makes a singularly interesting artistic and personal journey. From Henry James's posture of lofty, unentangled observation which made the admiring Baldwin declare that “social affairs are not generally speaking the writer's prime concern ... it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs distance which will allow, at least, for clarity,”³ from the endangered artist represented in the cool appraisal in Princes and Powers, his response to the negritude of Léopold Senghor and the French-speaking African writers in 1956, to the wholly engaged writer who published The Fire Next Time in 1963 is an extraordinary intellectual adventure.

Before and after 1963 (a year of turning points for Baldwin and the United States) the judgments of even his admirers suggest that his history limited him—by which they mean his social awareness and his racial savvy—and finally constricted him. He was charged by some with literary patricide for his evaluations of Richard Wright; charged with being alienated from his culture by other Afro-Americans, charged in turn with being too historical, ahistorical, too Henry Jamesian, too Harlemite; too distant from the folk and too close to them. In short for being, one, an American with all the rage and solitude that that implies; two, for being a Black man with all the vigor, the terror, the vulnerability, and humaneness that that implies; and, three, for being an artist with all the complexity, the wrath, the arrogance, and the pity that that demands. Finally, of course, the charge becomes an encomium, a praise-song, for the charge is that he revered truth above all things. “Giovanni's Room,” he once said, “is about what happens to a liar… and about the pressures to lie.”⁴ We remain grateful that he had the heart as well as the genius to tell us what he knew.

Like a steady light, integrity shone in his work, whether prolific or parched, fragile or unmanageable, this writer shaped our responses with his elegant, precise, and passionate language; he shaped our thoughts with his relentless perception and clarified for us the nature of a vital part of America. “He traveled the earth,” said one of his colleagues, “like its history and its biographer. He reported, criticized, made beautiful, analyzed, cajoled, lyricized, attacked, sang, made us think, made us better, made us consciously human.”⁵

It is difficult to think of many late-twentieth-century American essayists that can be counted as his peer in cultural analysis, and impossible to think of one that is his clear superior in that genre.

James Arthur Baldwin received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954; a Partisan Review Fellowship in 1956; a Ford Foundation Grant in 1959; was admitted to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964; and received the Legion of Honor in 1987.

He is survived in his immediate family by his mother, Berdis Jones Baldwin; his brothers and sisters: George Baldwin, Barbara Jamison, Wilmer Baldwin, David Baldwin, Gloria Smart, Ruth Crumm, Elizabeth Dingle, and Paula Whaley.

He is survived in the literary, academic, and literate world by those who may not see his like again.

1. From ''James Baldwin," by Chinua Achebe, in James Baldwin: The Legacy, edited by Quincy Troupe. (New York, 1989.) Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster.
2. From Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin. Copyright Beacon Press. Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.
3. Ibid.
4. From “I Didn't Have You Know a Metal:... A Conversation,” Gary Sheinfeld and James Baldwin, And Then, July 15, 1987. Copyright Gary Sheinfeld. Reprinted with permission.
5. From "Jimmy," by Amiri Baraka, in James Baldwin: The Legacy, edited by Quincy Troupe. (New York, 1989.) Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster.