James Baldwin

“….the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air…and his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.” 

                                                                                                 (from Sonny’s Blues, by James Baldwin).

“It doesn’t have anything to do with hypnotism, does it?” (Baldwin).

“No.  No,  of course not.”  (Bergman).

“Then it’s a joke.  A long, elaborate metaphor for the condition of the artist-I mean, any time, anywhere, all the time.” (Baldwin)

“Well, yes.  He (the artist) is always on the very edge of disaster; he is always on the very edge of great things.  Always.  Isn’t it so?  It is his element, like water is the element for fish.”  (Bergman)

                                                               

                 

In the dialogue above taken from Baldwin’s interview with Ingmar Bergman about his film, The Musician,  Baldwin expresses his fascination at the borderland artists often traverse, between reality and irreality, morality and immorality, between life and art itself.  The artists’ position is always an uncertain one.  This is both the exhiliaration and despair of the untenable position within himself and the world outside along which he continually walks a thinly drawn line; the liminal space in which  in one moment his status can change from hero to villain where the transgressive voice that both liberates  and signals its own death knell can turn on itself.  He is the iconic stand-in for all their dreams, desires and fears. The Bergman dialogue eloquently makes a statement about Baldwin’s own struggle with his identity as an artist and man (Black? Gay? American?) in early 1950’s America and his lifelong desire to portray the indignity and unrighteousness of black and white relations, especially its effect on black men and manhood, and the negative trajectory of artistthood that becomes the inevitable victim in the hierarchical rankings of politics and art.   Black manhood in the context of post Beat, pre-civil rights comes always at the expense of someone else’s prior claim.    Black men don’t want things done for them, Baldwin argued.  They simply want to be allowed to be “a man”.   Baldwin’s characters reflect this preoccupation as  Rufus states in Another Country:

“Sometimes I listen to those boats on the river-I listen to those whistles-and I think wouldn’t it be nice to get on a boat again and go someplace away from all these nowhere people, where a man could be treated like a man.” (Rufus, Another Country, 68).

So disaster and greatness are not exclusive of each inasmuch as they are continual shifts from one condition into another.  The most prime example came in Baldwin’s career in the early sixties when he was accused of not being “black” enough after returning home to America in the early sixties after a self-exile to France and Switzerland.  His novels, most written when he was abroad dramatise all his major preoccupations:  the conflicted identity of the black male (artist), the nature of sexuality, love and the role of the artist  while his essays bitterly recapitulated the hypocritical status of the black-white relations in America.   To a public having become accustomed to the powerful messages of Malcolm X, or the graceful eloquence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Baldwin’s sentimental journeys sometimes posed little satisfaction.  Critics, both black and white,  voiced the usual complaints: why, for example, did he spend all his literary energy in the depiction of black and white relations, with little narrative regard for either.    In this way, Baldwin continually walked along the precipice of art as politics though it was this exactly this stance which helped produce the enabling tension that marked his work.

Before leaving America for Paris several years prior, Baldwin had expressed how the uncertainty over his own identity in America had begun to affect his work: “I could not be certain whether I was really rich or really poor, really male or really female, really talented or a fraud, really strong or merely stubborn.”   Ironically, of course, as soon as he reached France he became, despite himself an “American” (“Notes for a Hypothetical Novel”, p. 149).  In The Politics of Exile, Bryan Washington writes that Baldwin had to leave America in order to become more American, to be able to “penetrate (through his writing) territories that in New York are for blacks finally impenetrable, which  forces Baldwin, dispossessed native son, to write America from a distance” (126).  In the documentary, “The Price of the Ticket”, Baldwin  talks about the incident that became the catalyst for his decision to leave.  After he is refused service by a white hostess in a New York restaurant, in a rage, he throws water on her face.   Years later as shown in the documentary, Baldwin’s regret at his action is unmistakable (“Poor girl,” he laments).  He must have known he wasn’t going to get served that day.  He received exactly the treatment he had expected, and used it as an excuse to leave, before he might become inflicted by the black man’s disease: the hatred of all white men.  He does not blame the girl who had refused him service years earlier because he understands the very culture that has provided the breeding ground for the incident has had an effect on her as well.  In this way, he extended the humane gesture of grace in the face of the most graceless. Though he may have been reduced for a few minutes to a state he feared much, of being “less than a “man”, the girl’s humanity has been equally reduced by her inaction and her inability to do the right thing.  She and Baldwin had entered the unbroken circle of ignorant circumstance, where movement occurs only inside, and rarely outside, and only when extreme events external to the circle have occurred, acting as catalysts.

Like the spectator who must step back from the face of the canvas in order that he may see a more unified image,  Baldwin had to distance himself from the myopic  vision of the black male identity in mid-fifties America and what that meant for the practice of his art.   Like other American artists, both black and white who had first set the precedence in the thirties, he  chose a country whose reputation for tolerance and artistic freedom were well known;  except that Paris in the fifties had to account for Algeria.  For In Paris, he had witnessed injustice too, and likened their struggle, the Algerians, to his own. In a reference to feeling a shared bond with the Algerian’s struggle, Baldwin said, “They are the niggers of France.”   And that knowledge, that realization scared him, because he had no other choice but to admit that he might have been wrong, all those years back when he was a schoolboy  refusing to say the pledge of allegiance because the America he was paying homage to was an America that didn’t include him.  Because what he had objected to and what he had refused to become had already been assigned to him by his new foreign friends who still saw the color of his skin first.  Yet, a strange thing happened with that realization:  he had been released from the burden of his color and had become, at least to them, an American.  And then knowing who he was, he was able to come back.   He came back home to find that some things had changed, and some things hadn’t.  The country’s race relations which had been exhilarated by the words of the civil rights leaders, like the man who stood powerfully reciting a speech he called, “The Ballet or the Bullet”, who had once told him that “If I am the warrior of this movement, then you are its poet” had faltered.  James Baldwin repatriated himself, telling Dick Cavett that he had no choice but to return to America, in a reference to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, saying that “they were killing his brothers.”    What more, Baldwin asked, is expected of the writer or the intellectual?   Baldwin begin writing essays and plays that unflinchingly portrayed the conflicted nature of race, sexuality and political relations in America.    But Baldwin, who had struggled intermittently for the role of the artist over the place of his art, was continually bombarded.  What did they expect from him, the people, the students  and the radicals? They said he wasn’t “black” enough.

                The decision to return America also came after he realized that he had only traded one adjective for another.  After having determined that he would not be the “black” writer he became in Paris, ultimately he became the “American” writer.   Later, other adjectives were used by those who needed to define him: black, American, gay.  Eventually, he would write a novel that, more than his others, closely aligned with his own voice, one that tried to articulate  his two major themes; his quest for identity and his need for exile and the futility of both.  In Another Country, Rufus, the young black musician, cannot overcome his failure at being a man, and finally kills himself.  Later, on her debut night, his sister sings the spiritual dedicated to her dead brother, the same one that can be heard almost thirty years later coming from Baldwin’s own raspy and soulful voice in the documentary James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket:

Precious Lord, take my hand,

Lead me on, let me stand.

Hear my cry, hear my call,

Take my hand, lest I fall

                Baldwin’s influence from the beginning comes as much from his essays as his fiction work. In  “The Discovery of What it means to be an American”  Baldwin  says he discovered from his years living in Paris that his identity-who he was-was inextricably and irrevocably linked with his European brother, and so he had to be “carried off  to the mountains of Switzerland to recreate his life” (Nobody Knows My Name,  5).  In a theme, repeated and most prominent to his understanding of his own life, he states that “Black men want to be treated as men” (29).  He expresses skepticism at the assumption held by some of his contemporaries that the study of African sources to American black writer’s works (such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy) would somehow “illuminate” these writings, that they are derivative of their black African ancestors’ culture.  He is unflinching and unrelenting in the examination of his own life, recognizing that although his intelligence might have elevated him somehow from the shabbier part of 5^th avenue, placing him beyond the “soda-pop joint, shoeshine parlor, grocery stores and squalid projects along 131^st street”, the world still encased him in adjectives. 

Thus to the world, he wasn’t a “writer” but a “black writer”;  and not just a “black writer” but a “black, gay writer”.  He wasn’t an intellectual but a “black” intellectual.  These adjectives persist today, used with equal carelessness among blacks and whites.

                Baldwin went to Europe and exchanged one adjective for another.  He became  known as not just a “writer” but an “American writer”.  In his novel, Another World,  Eric, the prodigal son-white, gay-returns home from Paris after having lived there for several years.  All the characters, Rufus, his sister Ida,  Vivaldo, and finally, Eric, are images of the author’s own identity,  representing the various stages in his own development as a writer, and as a black man.   Rufus,  disillusioned with his own color, hating not only whites, but blacks almost as much, falls in love with a white girl, who is portrayed as helpless and ignorant.  He takes his anger at whites out on her, beating  and alternately loving her in a conflicted cog of self-loathing and hate.  Rufus’ character embodies more than anyone else in its raw portrayal the anguish and injustice Baldwin felt at his own position as a black male gay artist in America. But Rufus does the artists’ bidding and cannot face what Baldwin understood that he must, and eventually commits suicide by jumping off the New York bridge.  Afterward,  his sister Ida steps in to idealize his memory, dedicating in her debut show, a spiritual in his name.  Yet Ida’s artistic ambition leads her away from who her own core.  Though in love with Vivaldo, she makes the decision in order to save her career to leave him for her white manager.  Vivaldo, the best and “only” friend Rufus had, is left to wonder about his love for her.  Ashamed to take her to his Italian family, eventually, he breaks his own silence, and finally begins to write the novel he has always wanted, struggling with his characters:  “He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel.  They did not seem to trust him.  They were all named, more or less, all more or less destined, the pattern he wished them to describe was clear to him.  But it did not seem clear to them.” (127).   Here,  Baldwin confronts his own multi-identities; his blackness, his gayness, his Americanness; none of which are certain to him but all which are nonetheless part of him.  Finally, he accepts the conflicted and multifaceted notion of identity that must always be evolving, changing, moving forward.  Baldwin had a desire and need to embrace the light, which for him meant telling the uncomfortable story about race, sexuality and love.  He understood the painter’s need to release the light from all the dark images because he felt the same way, too:    “Because (he) comes from darkness-as I do, in fact; we all do” (Transition review on Beauford Delaney, American artist, 1965).  This was an embracing of both the darkness and the light.    What becomes consistent in the themes and tone of Baldwin’s writing is the emphasis on love, and the assurance of love:  “Love is a battle, love is a war; love is growing up.” (“In Search of a Majority” 136), and affirmed earlier by his comment to Dick Cavett, “All men are brothers,”  he said, “if you can’t take it from there, you can’t take it anywhere.”