James Baldwin: An Appreciation by John Stevenson Featured in BBR December 1995 James Baldwin isn't much commented on these days, but for a few years in the early 1960s he lit up the cultural landscape like a bolt from the heavens-a prophet of the decade's black liberation struggle who became one of the most widely read African-American writers in this country's history. In his essays and novels, this one-time teenage preacher, with a gospel of recognition, responsibility and redemption, evokes an unprecedented response from white America. In his writings Baldwin trenchantly demonstrates the necessity of recognizing our sins: not just racism, but our refusal to really know other humans, to accept differences, and to love. The point is not guilt, but taking up responsibility ("you can't do both," he'd say [Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin by James Campbell, Viking, 306 pp., $21.95]), and redemption through knowing and loving. It was a gospel he continued to preach to the end of his life, in a multifarious stream of novels, plays, essays, reviews and interviews. The early '60s were his historical moment because that was a time, a brief window, when the possibility seemed alive, rather broadly among both white and black, that such a redemption might actually come to pass. But as American racism revealed itself to be a structure that would not move half a millimeter without being forced, and as the struggle against it assumed more militant or nationalistic forms, Baldwin was left, not exactly behind- for he closely followed and mostly supported the turn to militancy-but with a message that seemed increasingly irrelevant. That's the brief, capsule, story-or one of them. Despite the unavoidable necessity he faced of grappling with the realities of racism, Baldwin resisted categorization as a black writer: He was, he always insisted, an American writer. He was also a man whose unashamed sexuality and second novel Giovanni's Room (1956) presaged the gay liberation movement. Characteristically, Baldwin would not class himself as either a gay novelist or even as gay: What he was about, he'd say, was being open to love, no matter what the form or gender. His was a fascinating personality: gregarious, mercurial, witty, alcoholic, confrontational, intimate-legendary for his parties, his unreliability with appointments, his personal grace and magnetism, his stormy rages and his gracious apologies. Through it all, though, he always came across as real; what he confronted people with-whether charming, angry, needy, benevolent or profound-was always Jimmy. Growing up very poor in Harlem, convinced of his own ugliness, small and shy, Baldwin was nurtured by his mother, and by some of his school teachers, who provided an avenue of escape through reading-particularly one Orilla "Bill" Miller, of whom Baldwin said that it was "certainly because of her, who arrived in my terrifying life so soon, that I never really managed to hate white people." Not hating whites was of paramount importance because one of the most devastating effects of racism-this became a persistent Baldwin theme-was not the external oppression and consequent hardships which racism imposed, but its inward effects: not just the crushing of the victim's spirit, but the hate and rage that arises in response, which can itself tear a person apart. In his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin describes his own experience with this "dread, chronic disease" of the victim: "There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood-one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it." The necessity of making this choice had forced itself upon him in 1942, when he, eighteen and working in New Jersey, hurled a water pitcher at a waitress who had refused him service (she ducked and the pitcher shattered a mirror behind the bar). He got away, but how could he escape from the inner effects of his own smoldering fury, from the fact "that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred that I carried in my own heart"? It was the need to save himself from the fate of becoming furious, embittered and of no use to himself or others, that led Baldwin, some six years later and with $40 in his pocket, to flee America for Paris. Always lucky, or gifted, in the contacts he was able to make, and to lean on, Baldwin was welcomed to the city by Richard Wright, whom he'd sought out when the older novelist was still living in Brooklyn. And he did blossom there, seeking and finding, or defining, his own identity as a writer and a lover of other human beings-and also forming the chaotic style of existence, the constant drinking and search for companionship as well as the habits of financial irresponsibility and disordered working conditions that were to continue to characterize his life. Go Tell It On the Mountain (a novel centered in a ghetto church such as that in which Baldwin had for a time found a salvation), Notes of a Native Son, Giovanni's Room-in these novels and essays of the 1950s, Baldwin forged a place for himself on the American literary scene, refusing to be categorized as a "Negro author" (the latter novel, indeed, contains no black characters), but rather as a writer of great sensitivity and critical intelligence who wrote out of his personal, including his African-American, experience. But, in a new book of essays (Nobody Knows My Name, 1961), a new novel (Another Country, 1962), and the culminating Fire Next Time (1963), he soon surpassed merely personal expression to become prophet, moralist, preacher and an epicenter of American cultural upheaval. Baldwin's essential message was simple, and very much of its time. America did not have a "Negro problem" (as it was often called then), but a white problem, which consisted in the inability of those who built their identities on being white to face up to the realities either of American history or of their own bodies, feelings and selves: "They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it....I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be 'accepted' by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this-which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never-the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed." The problem, in other words, is one of white identity, which requires the projection of unacceptable facts and desires onto an alien other, and a solution is possible only through acceptance and love. Whites must learn to accept and love themselves and others, but in order for this to happen, blacks must also play a role: "...that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it....We cannot be free until they are free." Baldwin's great strength as an essayist is the dialectic contained in his style, which serves at the same time as a supple means of expression of the movement of his thought, and as an effective rhetoric, drawing the reader into new territories which might not have been entered had warning been posted in advance. It's a style which only an extended passage (this again from The Fire Next Time) can really illustrate: In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and....do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it....To be sensual, I think, is to accept and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew oneself at the foundation of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone the elucidation, of any conundrum-that is, any reality-so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality-this touchstone can only be oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves. Aspects of the style are every much of the time, the early 1960s, before it had become "the Sixties"-not just the use of "Negro," but the phrasing and the controlled way in which the sentences are drawn out, as well as the inward, solitary and elevated sensibility of the essayistic persona. And the content, too-the humanistic gospel of self-knowledge and love, accepting the full humanity of oneself (especially the full play of senses and feelings) as necessary means for love of others. (It's very like Erich Fromm's Art of Loving, from the same period.) It was a movement of thought and feeling which underlay much of the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, a sequence of ideas now very (or overly) familiar, which has by this point become the pap of pop psychology. I don't mean that Baldwin (or Fromm, for that matter) was a purveyor of pap, for at its inception this set of ideas seemed (and was, culturally) revelatory and even revolutionary. It's simply that this cultural current has run its course and revealed its limitations-which is not to say that it doesn't also, and still, have its truths. The problem isn't truth but adequacy, particularly when this is offered, as it was by Baldwin and others, as a means of social salvation. Its adequacy was quickly tested at the time, as the burgeoning struggle for black liberation challenged Martin Luther King's very Baldwinesque strategy of appeal to conscience with the confrontational approach of "black power" associated with figures and groups such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichal and the Black Panthers. Baldwin himself was galvanized, and often thrown into a sort of frenzy, by the movement (which itself became increasingly frenzied as the decade progressed), and came to support, albeit from a distance, most of the moves toward greater militancy. Like many intellectuals and literary figures of the time, he was torn between the demands of his art and those of the social movement of the time, as well as constantly challenged by the escalating radicality of its political positions. Along with many interviews, essays and short articles, he produced a play (Blues for Mister Charlie), short stories (collected in Going to Meet the Man), a screenplay on the life of Malcolm X (which much later became the beginning point for Spike Lee's film), and a novel (Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone) but these did not have the impact of his earlier fiction, and have often been criticized for a subordination of artistry to didacticism. The problem Baldwin faced, though, went deeper than this. As he became more committed to the movement of the oppressed, more political (in the broad, '60s sense), Baldwin felt he faced a fundamental problem of form. The formal qualities of the novels and essays he'd written, their shapes and means of movement, the repertoire of language and its cadences, were derived from white culture. They represented the language of the oppressor. A little later, in the long essay No Name in the Street (1972), he spoke of the same dilemma as faced by the colonialized as they fought for their freedom: "At that point, the cultural pretensions of history are revealed as nothing less than a mask for power, and thus it happens that, in order to get rid of Shell, Texaco, Coca-Cola, and the Sixth Fleet, and the friendly American soldier whose mission it is to protect these investments, one finally throws Balzac and Shakespeare-and Faulkner and Camus-out with them. Later, of course one may welcome them back, but on one's own terms..." The language and forms used by the committed literary artist, Baldwin came to think, must spring from the experience and culture of the subjugated. In his own case, he would look to jazz and the blues. It's clear, though, that Baldwin was never able to develop the sort of forms he sought. The above-mentioned No Name in the Street, for instance, which rivals many of his earlier extended essays in its dialectic and perceptions, is also very like his earlier work in its basic formal qualities, and although his fiction exhibits more street talk and hip language, and both fiction and essays become more rambling and less tightly controlled, no revolution in basic form is effected. Through the '70s and into the '80s, (he died in 1987) Baldwin continued to write (although with diminished output), continued to be an important literary figure, but without new breakthroughs. It's pretty clear (although the word remains unmentioned in these accounts of his life) that the ravages of alcoholism must have been a major factor in both the decline in literary production of his last decades, and his death. Baldwin left an important legacy-not so much of works and accomplishment (although he left those too) as of struggle and quest. The most important aspect of James Baldwin's life and work is his unrelenting attack upon some of the more crucial and perennial problems of human social life, basic questions which revolve around dichotomies like politics and morality, love and power, the personal and the political. Yeats thought one had to choose between "Perfection of the life, or of the work." Baldwin wrestled with this conundrum (for he was much committed to his personal relationships with others), but also with the contradictions between art and politics and between the particular demands imposed by his identity as a black man, and more general ones imposed by simply being human. Perhaps he broke himself on these rocks and achieved no final synthesis, but his profound and honest struggle is exemplary and full of lessons in these days of debates and dilemmas concerning multiculturalism, identity politics, the possibilities of social change, and the role of artists and intellectuals. John Stevenson lives in Chicago, IL. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.