The Cross of Redemption (2 page)

One thinks of Aristotle’s admonition that in a well-made play a probable impossibility is always preferable to an improbable possibility, such is the narrative conundrum that is James Arthur Baldwin. Not that it is improbable that a young black man should struggle out of such unforgiving circumstances to achieve literary fame and fortune—literally hundreds of young men and women have accomplished just that—but it is the staggering quality and sheer magnitude of Baldwin’s achievements that beggar the imagination. Musical prodigies, though few and far between, are numerous and sundry; literary prodigies are rarely ever heard from, and the few who shine forth tend to burn out quite young.

Any new glimpse into the probable impossibility that is James Baldwin is a welcome treat and treasure.

As a companion volume to
James Baldwin: Collected Essays
(1998), the Library of America’s edition of his collected nonfiction, these heretofore uncollected occasional writings give us a different lens through which to view Baldwin’s artistry. A collection of snapshots. A sketchbook. An omnium-gatherum of those ideas he revisited most often. A GPS map of the geography of his mind’s progress. It brings together an eclectic mix of reviews, essays, and public letters from 1947 to 1985 that charts his incredible passage.

The trajectory of James Baldwin’s life has the quality of epic saga. He fled racially intolerant America for France in 1948. He had already become acquainted with Richard Wright, by far the most successful and famous black novelist in America at the time. Wright had intervened on Baldwin’s behalf with his publisher, Harper and Row, to obtain an option for the unfinished first novel. But that novel would not come together. Now in war-scarred France Baldwin tried to try again, yet he quickly found himself in even worse circumstances than he had faced back in his homeland. No money, ill health, and, much to his chagrin, racist encounters with the French police led him to near despair. The famous American colony of intellectuals and artists and writers (now including Richard Wright) soon grew peevish with him. Fortunately for Baldwin, his young Swiss lover, Lucien Happersberger, with the help of his father, was able to spirit Baldwin away to an Alpine village, Loèche-les-Bains, which Baldwin would later write about with great affection in his essay “A Stranger in the Village.” There he would regain his health, his optimism, his creative spark, and, to the gut-bucket blues of Bessie Smith, he would complete the novel now called
Go Tell It on the Mountain
. He was twenty-nine when Alfred A. Knopf published the book, to great acclaim. This was the story he had been struggling to tell, of a large family in a small Harlem apartment, of a loving mother, of an unreasonable minister father, of communing with the Holy Spirit, of becoming fascinated with the wide world.

His second novel seemed initially to hit a roadblock—a brief, lyrical novel written from the point of view of a white man in love with another white man, an Italian named Giovanni—which led Baldwin’s publisher to abandon the now-too-controversial-to-handle young black writer. In the meantime, Beacon Press brought out a collection of his essays, often written to keep body and soul together while he completed his first novel. That collection,
Notes of a Native Son
(1955), drew even greater attention to James Baldwin, marking him as a skilled essayist and thinker and commentator on the racial scene. The volume contained seminal essays for which he would become known for decades to come, including the title essay, in which he artfully came to some reconciliation with his late stepfather and somehow spun that heartache with larger events dealing with race and politics and humanity. There was that style, part sermon, part nineteenth-century mandarin (Henry James, about whom he had written and felt a certain kinship as a fellow expatriate, now being a profound influence on his prose).

The next year saw the publication of the new novel,
Giovanni’s Room
, which miraculously survived the firestorm of homophobia and firmly established Baldwin as a hot novelist of note, an important new voice.

Thus began over a decade of a rather heady and tumultuous life, dominated not only by tremendous literary production, but by a hands-on involvement in the struggle for civil rights for black folk, particularly in the South, and throughout America. He was commissioned by top-flight national magazines—
Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy
—to go to North Carolina and Tennessee and Arkansas and Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia, foreign lands for him, to write about those increasingly heated battles. There was something about his background—this Northern child of Holy Roller Harlem, this American who had fled racist America for France only to encounter another racism, this gay man (the ultimate outsider)—that gave James Baldwin not only the insight, but a language and a moral vision inflected by the righteous rhythms of Protestantism, that made his writings like none other. The essays collected in
Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son
(1961) and later in the hugely successful
The Fire Next Time
, the 1963 account of the Nation of Islam that turned into a national sermon on race, all served to transform Baldwin into something more than a writer for the American public and the world at large—if the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was the civil rights movement’s Moses, James Baldwin had become its Jeremiah, despite his protestations of speaking for no one but himself.

Of course Baldwin considered himself first and foremost a novelist. Nineteen sixty-two’s
Another Country
represented a maturation that seemed to represent the fruition of all his literary ambitions. A dramatic exploration of love and race in its many manifestations—black man with white woman, white man with black woman, black man with white man—the book proved to be even more controversial than
Giovanni’s Room
. It was banned in many states yet became one of the best-selling paperback novels of 1963.

Radio, television, far-flung speaking engagements, interviews galore, and a taste for the high life—Baldwin was now leading as hectic a life as any million-seller recording artist, perhaps even more so. The cover of
Time
magazine. A place on the rostrum at the 1963 March on Washington. This period was a lengthy crescendo that resonated throughout the 1960s.

But the 1960s were both halcyon and hell for Baldwin. More literary successes followed: a Broadway play,
Blues for Mister Charlie
(1964); a collection of short stories,
Going to Meet the Man
(1965); another best-selling novel,
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
(1968). And also a time for assassinations: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr.—men he knew, men he considered friends. He even had a problematic relationship with Robert F. Kennedy. The weight of all this bloodshed, and a lifestyle that seemed to be spiraling out of control, led him to go into what looked more and more like an unofficial exile, first to Turkey and later to the south of France, where throughout the 1970s he held court in a three hundred-year-old farmhouse in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, rather like an oracle frequently visited by acolytes and pilgrims and admirers from far and wide.

Here’s the thing about James Baldwin’s prose:

As noted earlier, from the start, he was audacious in his love for complex sentences; one might say even fearless in the way he deployed the English language. Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, among English-language writers, dared put so much demand on the language. To watch them create a sentence is often like watching a high-wire act. Death-defying sentences. Lush, romantic sentences. Sentences that dared to swallow the entire world. These writers were undaunted by outrageous complexity, clauses, dependent and independent, modified, interrupted, periodic. They trusted in the force of their meaning and their music (and the rules of good grammar) to carry the feat. But the aforementioned writers almost always saved their linguistic pyrotechnics for fiction: Baldwin unleashed his most baroque prose in his nonfiction, something that not only set him apart from his contemporaries, gave him a singular voice, but also allowed him to create thoughts of great nuance and shading and meaning. Reading a Baldwin sentence can feel like recreating thought itself. One has to take hands off the rudder and trust the river of thought as it flows. Here is a sentence from a 1967 review of Elia Kazan’s novel
The Arrangement:

I do not mean to suggest that Baldwin was totally given over to highly complex prose, that he overindulged in ornate rhetoric. In fact this book contains fewer rococo passages than in some of his better-known work. (See
The Fire Next Time.)
Rather, I hope to underscore Baldwin’s uncanny mastery of the English language; how, like his contemporary Miles Davis on the trumpet, his skill allowed him to go any place he wanted, with deceptive ease. Like magic.

But above all—and this cannot be stressed strongly enough—meaning was always utmost. Despite a highly evolved aesthetic sensibility, despite a punishingly high level of artistic standards, Baldwin’s goal was always to communicate, not to show off. George Orwell would definitely approve of his overall strategies. For him the medium was not the message; the message was always the message.

It is easy to say that Baldwin’s main message was racial equality. Surely the topic flows through his work more than it ebbs. Yet one makes a grave mistake in pigeonholing James Baldwin’s worldview so narrowly, for throughout this miscellany, though racial topics and racial politics are often the touchstone, his true themes are more in line with the early church fathers, with Erasmus of Rotterdam, with the great Western philosophers, with theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and James Cone. And though it is too broad—if not useless—to say his true topic is humanity, it is useful to see how, no matter his topic, how often his writing finds some ur-morality upon which to rest, how he always sees matters through a lens of decency, how he writes with his heart as well as with his head. Baldwin left the pulpit at sixteen, but he never stopped preaching.

This book has been organized into Baldwin’s essays, profiles, reviews, letters, introductions, and a short story.

The reviews show a writer of broad tastes; a writer always agile and with a rapier wit, sometimes feeling a bit sharper than necessary, but always hitting his mark. Aside from Gorky, he reviewed biographies, the fiction of Erskine Caldwell, Catholic philosophy, a novel by Mississippi newspaperman Hodding Carter, and a late novel by James M. Cain, among others. There is a fascinating 1949 piece he wrote for
Commentary
, “Too Late, Too Late,” in which he rounds up seven books about black Americans, including John Hope Franklin’s classic
From Slavery to Freedom
. Baldwin is rather harsh on all of them—bewilderingly so:

Truth to tell, James Baldwin comes across in almost all his reviews as a pretty strict and unforgiving taskmaster. This revelation should come as no surprise to students of Baldwin, who notoriously excoriated
Native Son—
written by his chief patron, Richard Wright—an act that broke their friendship for the rest of their lives. And there was also the review of
Raintree County
, by Ross Lockridge Jr., which called the book phony, among other select qualifications. The author committed suicide shortly before the review was published; Baldwin qualified his original review by essentially saying the book was still no good.

Baldwin’s letters, on the other hand, strike a more complex mélange of emotions. Indeed, his tone is often fiery, as in his 1970 open letter to activist Angela Davis, who had just been imprisoned. (“One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles.”) His tone is militant, as condemnatory toward the U.S.A. as ever; yet his tenderness toward Davis and her comrades elicits a forlorn sense of longing.

His 1968 essay “Black Power,” written in response to activist Stokely Carmichael’s 1967 book of the same name, feels even more like a plea. In a 1967 letter to
Freedomways
, he takes issue with public calls for blacks to embrace anti-Semitism, saying that black folk have no use of such ancient evil.

An arresting sequence of letters, published together in
Harper’s
in 1963, strikes yet another note, showing us a young James Baldwin on the road, from September 1961 to February 1962. Paris. Israel. Turkey. Switzerland. Here we see glimpses of a much more idealistic young man, an admixture of hope and light and wonder and concern for his loved ones, tempered by discomfort and a clear eye cast toward the injustice he encounters: