JAMES BALDWIN
James (Arthur) Baldwin (1924-1987)
American writer, noted for his novels on sexual and personal identity, and
sharp essays on civil-rights struggle in the United States. Baldwin also
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. Several of his novels dealt with
homosexual liaisons.
"If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy,
re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah
the rainbow sigh, No more water, the fire next time!" (from The Fire
Next Time, 1963)
James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, as the son of a domestic
worker. Illegitimate, he never knew his own father and was brought up in
great poverty. When he was three, his mother married a factory worker, a
hard and cruel man, who also was a storefront preacher. Baldwin adopted
the surname from his stepfather, who died eventually in a mental hospital
in 1943. In his childhood Baldwin was a voracious reader. When he was
about twelve his first story appeared in a church newspaper. At the age of
17 Baldwin left his home. After graduation from high school, he worked in
several ill-paid jobs and started his literary 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 a new way, to be apprehensive about my own." (from Notes of a
Native Son, 1955)
In the early 1940s Baldwin was in defence work in Belle Meade, New Jersey,
and in 1943 he began writing full-time. His book about the store-front
churches in Harlem with the photographer Theodore Pelatowski did not gain
success. In 1945 he had his first encounter with the FBI, in Woodstock,
where he was living in a cabin the 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 felt like being
gang-raped, "but they made me hate them, too, with a hatred like hot
ice..." (from The Devil Finds Work, 1976)
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. Armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter Baldwin
finished the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain in Switzerland. It was
followed by the play THE AMEN CORNER (1955). Baldwin 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.
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. "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)
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 turmoils 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.
James (Arthur) Baldwin (1924-1987)
American writer, noted for his novels on sexual and personal identity, and
sharp essays on civil-rights struggle in the United States. Baldwin also
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. Several of his novels dealt with
homosexual liaisons.
"If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy,
re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah
the rainbow sigh, No more water, the fire next time!" (from The Fire
Next Time, 1963)
James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, as the son of a domestic
worker. Illegitimate, he never knew his own father and was brought up in
great poverty. When he was three, his mother married a factory worker, a
hard and cruel man, who also was a storefront preacher. Baldwin adopted
the surname from his stepfather, who died eventually in a mental hospital
in 1943. In his childhood Baldwin was a voracious reader. When he was
about twelve his first story appeared in a church newspaper. At the age of
17 Baldwin left his home. After graduation from high school, he worked in
several ill-paid jobs and started his literary 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 a new way, to be apprehensive about my own." (from Notes of a
Native Son, 1955)
In the early 1940s Baldwin was in defence work in Belle Meade, New Jersey,
and in 1943 he began writing full-time. His book about the store-front
churches in Harlem with the photographer Theodore Pelatowski did not gain
success. In 1945 he had his first encounter with the FBI, in Woodstock,
where he was living in a cabin the 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 felt like being
gang-raped, "but they made me hate them, too, with a hatred like hot
ice..." (from The Devil Finds Work, 1976)
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. Armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter Baldwin
finished the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain in Switzerland. It was
followed by the play THE AMEN CORNER (1955). Baldwin 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.
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. "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)
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 turmoils 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.