James (Arthur) Baldwin (1924-1987 )

"An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian," Baldwin told Life magazine. "His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive."

His Life:

Childhood and Family

"Born on August 2, 1924, in New York City's Harlem Hospital, James Arthur Jones was the illegitimate child of Emma Berdis Jones. Three years after the birth, his mother married David Baldwin, a preacher originally from New Orleans, and James Jones became James Baldwin.

His stepfather had recently migrated from New Orleans to Harlem. His stepfather, an evangelical preacher, struggled to support a large family and demanded the most rigorous religious behavior from his nine children. His father criticized young James at every possibility, calling him ugly because of his large, bulging eyes, calling him ignorant and hopeless. "He was righteous in the pulpit and a monster in the house," Baldwin told the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren. "Maybe he saved all kinds of souls, but he lost his children, every single one of them. And it wasn't so much a matter of punishment with him: he was trying to kill us. I've hated a few people, but actually I've hated only one person, and that was my father."

"I guess the one thing my father did for me was that he taught me how to fight," Baldwin once told the New York Post. "I had to know how to fight because I fought him so hard. He taught me--what my real weapons were. Which were patience. And a kind of ruthless determination. Because I had to endure it; to go under and come back up; to wait."

However, the demands of caring for younger siblings and his stepfather's religious convictions in large part shielded James from the harsh realities of Harlem street life during the 1930s. Baldwin was kept so busy at home trying to help his mother care for his eight brothers and sisters, that he had no time for the violent life on the streets. And added to the hard economic times of Harlem was the Great Depression gripping all of America during Baldwin's youth.

Refuge in Books

Baldwin took refuge in books, reading everything that he could. He would later brag that he went through all the books in Harlem's two libraries, and then had to go downtown to the New York Public Library on Forty Second Street for more. Dickens was a favorite author for him, his rags to riches stories being perfect for Baldwin. He saw his own life in Dickens's novels.

Another refuge was his mother who nurtured him where his father abused him, and outside the home, Baldwin was fortunate in finding other supportive adults. At his first public school, P.S. 24, he had one of the few black principals in New York. For Baldwin, this woman was living proof that a black person could make it to the top, that a black person was not doomed to menial positions.

Also at P.S. 24 he formed a strong bond with one of his teachers, a young white woman from the Midwest whom he called "Bill" Miller. Miller took an interest in her young student, encouraging his bookish-ness, helping him in his first efforts at writing. She and her sister took young Baldwin to the theater, and it was there that he witnessed the Orson Welles, all-black production of Macbeth. Baldwin sat through the performance entranced; his love for the theater was confirmed that day. Baldwin was also a fan of the movies, loving in particular the screen adaptation of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.

High School

Baldwin's life was receiving a challenge from another quarter as well, for he was accepted to the De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx, a predominantly white school, many of whose students were Jewish. This was a new world for Baldwin, and here he met several people who would become life-long friends. Richard Avedon, the future photographer, was one of these; Baldwin worked with him on the school's literary magazine, the "Magpie", and would much later collaborate with Avedon on a picture book of America, Nothing Personal.

Another formative influence was a friendship with the older black artist, Beauford Delaney, a man who showed Baldwin that a black could make it in the world of art.

By seventeen, Baldwin had become disillusioned with the church. "Being in the pulpit was like being in the theater," Baldwin later wrote in The Fire Next Time. "I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked. I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives. I knew how to work a congregation until the last dime was surrendered...." With all this turmoil in his private life, Baldwin did not graduate from high school with his class; he did so, however six months later, in 1942. At this point, his youth in Harlem was coming rapidly to an end.

1943-----Leaving Harlem

There he met black novelist Richard Wright and Wright helped him to get a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Award. However Baldwin was unable to finish his first manuscript during the time limit of his award. He saw this as a failure and so began writing essays.

In 1946 at age twenty-two his article, "The Harlem Ghetto," about anti-Semitism in the black community, was published by the American Jewish Committee, and so made a name for Baldwin as a new voice. His articles were in demand, and in 1948 he published his first short story, "Previous Condition,". The story of a black artist exiled between two worlds--that of the whites as well as of the blacks--announced a powerful theme that would recur in most of Baldwin's writing: the story of dispossession and a search for identity.

Eventually, in 1948, he moved to Paris, using funds from a Rosenwald Foundation fellowship to pay his passage. "I had no idea what might happen to me in France, but I was very clear what would happen if I remained in New York." In Paris, Richard Wright and Beauford Delaney had both taken up residence before Baldwin, and when he arrived there he was nearly broke and spoke no French. In France Baldwin undertook a process of self-realization that included an acceptance of his heritage.

In 1953, he published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain In this first and best-known novel, he tells the story of a Harlem teenager's struggles with a repressive father and with religious conversion. "Black family life--the charged emotional atmosphere between parents and children, brothers and sisters--provided a major theme in Baldwin's fiction."

During the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s, Baldwin became an active participant. As various groups struggled to end racial discrimination and segregation, Baldwin became an increasingly ardent spokesman, describing in essays and speeches the agony of being black in America. While the role was not new for him, his ativities of the 1960s were undertaken because of his reputation.

By 1970 Baldwin had had enough of living in America again. The assassinations of so many black leaders--Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers--had taken their toll on Baldwin and the country as a whole. Following a long illness, he returned to Europe and bought a farmhouse in the French countryside. Though he would still "commute" between continents, this would become his permanent home until his death in 1987.

Death

When he died on December 1, 1987, his work was not finished. His funeral was attended by 5,000 friends and relatives mourning the passing of a considerable talent. Writers Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison spoke and Baldwin himself was there at the funeral, on tape, singing "Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on,"

Go Tell It on the Mountain is highly autobiographical. It is the story of John Grimes who must come to grips with the cruel treatment of his father as well as with the power of religion. As John W. Roberts noted in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "John Grimes is Baldwin seeking in the movies, the streets of Harlem, religion, and a silent mother the answers to questions hidden in her memory. And he is young Baldwin polishing his intellectual armor in hopes of using it as a weapon against the forces that would destroy him in his present environment." Though having experienced a religious revelation, John really has not changed by the end of the novel. Religion does not set him free.

The novel stands as 'an honest, intensive, self-analysis, functioning simultaneously to illuminate self, society, and mankind as a whole."

Giovanni's Room, was first published in England, and once the book proved successful there, it was brought out in America. A departure for Baldwin, the novel had no black characters. Instead, it focussed on the tall, blond American, David, who ping-pongs back and forth between his fiancée, Hella, and his Italian lover, Giovanni. "Nevertheless," pointed out Fred L. Standley in Dictionary of Literary Biography, "the principal concerns of the novel are similar to those of previous books--the search for sexual awareness and psychological identity; the complexity of the father-son relationship; the paradox of the relation between freedom and attachment; the painful and baffling complexity of relations among male and female, male and male."

"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.

By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.

From book flap:
At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable.

For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war. Overpowering in its vitality, extravagant in the intensity of its feeling, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is a major work of American literature.

From the book flap:
Like the blues -- sweet, sad and full of truth -- this masterly work of fiction rocks us with powerful emotions. In it are anger and pain, but above all, love -- affirmative love of a woman for her man, the sustaining love of a black family. Fonny, a talented young artist, finds himself unjustly arrested and locked in New York's infamous tombs. But his girlfriend, Tish, is determined to free him, and to have his baby, in this starkly realisitic tale... a powerful endictment of American concepts of justice and punishment in our time.

The novel takes in 30 years in the lives of a group of friends, who start out preaching and singing in Harlem churches, survive (or do not survive) incest, war, poverty, the civil-rights struggle, as well as wealth and love and fame--in Korea, Africa, Birmingham, New York, Paris. Of the members of "Trumpets of Zion" quarter, who sang gospel music in their teens, one is murdered, another goes mad, a third goes on the needle and fourth becomes Arthur Montana, world- acclaimed "Emperor of Soul." Arthur shares the center of the book with Julia, at first a fiery preacher, "called" by the Holy Ghost as a child, whose sermons are among Baldwin's best inspirations.

Many critics view Baldwin's essays as his most significant contribution to American literature.

These include Notes of a Native Son, 1955, which in 1999 was selected by a distinguished panel as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the century. Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen "serve to illuminate the condition of the black man in twentieth-century America."

From a Reader:
The ten essays in this collection were originally published in Commentary, Partisan Review, Harper's, and other national periodicals during the late 1940s and early 1950s; Baldwin revised a few essays, arranged them by theme, and added "Autobiographical Notes" as a preface. They are among the most compelling, insightful pieces ever written on what it means to be an American and, in particular, what means to be a black American. "The story of the Negro in America is the story of America," Baldwin writes, "or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty."

Meanwhile came publication of Nobody Knows My Name, "a brilliant ... collection of essays," according to Irving Howe in the New York Times Book Review. Reviewing the selection in Commonweal, James Finn wrote that Nobody Knows My Name "is confirmation that James Baldwin is one of America's finest writers.... What sets Baldwin apart from even the best of his contemporaries is that he is an unproclaimed moralist...." In a critical evaluation of much of Baldwin's writings, David Littlejohn noted in Black on White that Baldwin "is the most powerful and important American essayist of the postwar period, perhaps of the century," and that Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name will maintain their place among the small collection of genuine American classics."

The Fire Next Time consists of two essays in the form of letters, with the first as prefatory to the beliefs and concepts presented in the second. "My Dungeon Shook" contains advice to a young black male who is the author's nephew and is about to enter the domain of racial conflict on the anniversary of the proclamation that is supposed to have set him free. It is a forthright assault upon the "impertinent assumption ... that black men are inferior to white men" and an assertion of the black's inherent "unassailable and monumental dignity."

n 1970 James Baldwin and Margaret Mead met for an extraordinary seven-and-a-half-hour discussion about race and society. Mead brought her knowledge of racism as practiced in remote societies around the world. Baldwin brought his personal experience with the legacy of black American history. They talked with candor, passion, rage, and brilliance, and their discussion became this unique volume. Here is Baldwin's creativity and fire. Here is Mead's scholarship and reason. And here, for all to see, are their prejudices, their pain, and finally, their shared desire to find the thread that binds us all.

This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies displays James Baldwin’s fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain—the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his retum to the American South to confront a violent America face-to-face.

From book flap:
James Baldwin At The Movies... Provocative, timeless, brilliant.

Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist, offering us a vision of America's self-delusions and deceptions. Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained us and shaped our consciousness. And here, too, is the stunning prose of a writer whose passion never diminished his struggle for equality, justice, and social change.

In his searing and moving essay, James Baldwin explores the Atlanta child murders that took place over a period of twenty-two months in 1979 and 1980. Examining this incident with a reporter's skill and an essayist's insight, he notes the significance of Atlanta as the site of these brutal killings-a city that claimed to be "too busy to hate"-and the permeation of race throughout the case: the black administration in Atlanta; the murdered black children; and Wayne Williams, the black man tried for the crimes.

Compiled into one volume are James Baldwin's essays from the past three decades. Except for the lead article, "The Price of the Ticket," all have been published before. The selections are arranged in chronological order and include his three book-length essays, "The Fire Next Time," "No Name in the Street" and "The Devil Finds Work." Baldwin's writings on the civil rights movement, his analysis of Richard Wright's Native Son (Harper, 1940) and his thoughts on his childhood experiences are a few of the topics in this volume.