New York City laid a claim to one of its most distinguished native sons last Wednesday, October 7, when a plaque honoring James Baldwin was officially unveiled at 81 Horatio Street in Greenwich Village.
The plaque in honor of James Baldwin at 81 Horatio Street
in New York City, unveiled on Oct. 7, 2015.
Baldwin lived at 81 Horatio Street from 1958 to 1961 and wrote part of his 1962 novel Another Country there. The plaque commemorates his time at the address and acknowledges in a more tacit way the influence Greenwich Village had on Baldwin’s art and activism ever since he first found a refuge there, while still in his teens, in the early 1940s. (Rufus Scott, the doomed protagonist of Another Country, thinks of the Village as “the place of liberation”—years before real-life events in the neighborhood would give that term added resonance.)
The plaque is a project of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, with the support of the Two Boots Foundation; its unveiling made an apt coda to the recent citywide “Year of James Baldwin” marking what would have been the author’s 90th year.
At the ceremony Library of America publisher Max Rudin was part of a roster of speakers that included James Baldwin’s nephew Trevor Baldwin, writer Fran Lebowitz, and Gregory Pardlo, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Enjoy photos from the scene via the gallery below, and click here for the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation’s video of the complete ceremony.
Trevor Baldwin addresses the crowd on Oct. 7, 2015.
Library of America Publisher Max Rudin, writer Fran Lebowitz,
and Karen Loew of the Greenwich Village Society for
Historic Preservation before the unveiling on Oct. 7, 2015.
Max Rudin offers remarks on Oct. 7, 2015.
A crowd fills Horatio Street to hear Fran Lebowitz speak
from the stoop (far right) on Oct. 7, 2015.
Click here for complete information on Later Novels, the third and final volume in The Library of America’s Baldwin edition.
Our series of guest posts by writers of fiction, poetry, essays, and history continues today with a contribution from Sara Jaffe, whose just-published debut novel Dryland is a coming-of-age story set in Portland, Oregon, in the early 1990s. The novel is drawing praise from a number of other writers: novelist Justin Torres (We the Animals) has cited Jaffe as “an important new voice” and Sara Marcus (Girls to the Front) called the book “a gorgeous, layered, meticulous, clamoring, beating heart of a thing.”
Below, Jaffe discusses four authors who have influenced both her writing in general and Dryland in particular.
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room. When I was living in San Francisco, I had a sudden desire to re-read Giovanni’s Room and discovered I no longer had a copy. I ran out to the used bookstore and bought one. Upon arriving home and opening the book, I discovered an inscription: from S., my first real girlfriend, with whom I’d had a very prolonged and dramatic breakup, to the girl she dated after me. It was too perfect. Giovanni’s Room is a novel of love and doom in equal measure. And though the ultimate doom of Giovanni’s death may bookend the novel, the few scenes in the middle that describe the night David and Giovanni meet and first start to fall for each other are like gay love candy—so vivid, heady, and sweet.
Part of the reason it works so well is that, though the story is told through David’s first-person point-of-view, he’s in such deep denial about his attraction to Giovanni that it takes the older queens calling him out for us to fully get the sense of what’s going on. We get both the subjective thrill of David’s unnamed excitement and the vicarious thrill of Jacques and the others watching and naming it. It’s such a deft and interesting use of the first person, because it doesn’t put the onus on the reader to identify with David; rather, it allows us to observe him.
As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
(Cape & Smith, 1930)
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying. “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.” I still have my copy of As I Lay Dying from college, with that sentence, at the end of one of Dewey Dell’s sections, underlined. I think it was one of the first times I underlined a sentence in a novel not for what it had to do, in whatever convoluted and out-of-context manner, with me, but because I was so moved by the language itself. Every syllable pulses, and the image is indelible. As I Lay Dying did something to my ear, forever changed it. The novel marks when I began to seek tension-action-drama in the relationship of words to each other in a sentence, rather than (solely) at the level of narrative.
Jane Bowles, My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles. I find it very difficult to describe the particular strangeness of a Jane Bowles story. Each character is so tightly contained in his or her own universe, utterly incapable of—or uninterested in—understanding why any other person says or does anything. A friend once described Bowles’s characters as having no interiority, but I don’t think that’s exactly it—it’s as if their interiors are turned outward, as if they lead with interiority, their speech and actions hindered by neither societal conventions, self-consciousness, nor self-awareness. In such a landscape, there’s no such thing as contradiction. And causality itself becomes completely upended, doing miraculous things to plot. What “happens” is dictated only by each character’s peculiar, particular logic. Bowles’s writing is soaked in an anxiety I recognize.
I don’t know if or how Jane Bowles actually shows up in my writing. I don’t discard psychological realism. But, in writing Dryland, when I was up against a passage that I had trouble wresting from cliche, I opened up a document called “Mrs. Copperfield” and tried to write it in a Bowlesian style. It helped me locate productive disconnections between characters, and to make characters’ actions and emotions unfamiliar to themselves.
Haunted Houses
by Lynne Tillman
(Poseidon Press, 1987)
Lynne Tillman, Haunted Houses. In the conventional bildungsroman, the protagonist is set on a path of self-discovery, and once he or she discovers what needs to be discovered, he or she changes, or comes right up to the cusp of change. But in Haunted Houses, Tillman’s first novel, the three protagonists—Grace, Emily, and Jane, who exist in parallel chapters but never meet—do not change, not really. Or, maybe more accurately, Tillman doesn’t foreground a narrative of change, or development, in any conventional sense. Her characters accrue experiences, they move through their lives, they think and act but when you remove the imperative of change each thought and action achieves a kind of parity with each other. In the resulting flatness, we feel the grain of lived experience—what it is to be a person in a body in the world.
Sara Jaffe’s fiction has appeared in such publications as Fence and BOMB and she co-edited The Art of Touring (Yeti, 2009), an anthology of writing and visual art by musicians based on her experience as guitarist (1999–2004) for the post-punk band Erase Errata. Jaffe currently lives and teaches in Portland.
Kate Bolick and Darryl Pinckney
at The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts on Sept. 17, 2015.
In a moment of literary serendipity last Thursday, one writer in The Library of America series was honored at the home of another when James Baldwin was the subject of a public program at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s former estate in western Massachusetts. Darryl Pinckney, editor of the forthcoming LOA collection James Baldwin: Later Novels, joined journalist and critic Kate Bolick for a talk on contemporary race relations and how Baldwin’s writings continue to resonate in twenty-first-century America. The conversation kicked off the latest season of “Touchstones at the Mount,” an ongoing series of author talks hosted by Bolick.
By coincidence, James Baldwin: Later Novels will be published one week from today–on the same day as Edith Wharton: Four Novels of the 1920s, the fifth installment in The Library of America edition of Wharton’s collected works.
In addition to editing the forthcoming Baldwin volume for The Library of America, Pinckney is the author of the novel High Cotton and the nonfiction works Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature and Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy. Bolick, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, is the author of Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own, a combination of memoir and cultural criticism that includes a lengthy consideration of Edith Wharton’s life and work.
Darryl Pinckney (holding James Baldwin: Later Novels)
and Kate Bolick at The Mount
in Lenox, Massachusetts on Sept. 17, 2015.
Watch Readers’ Almanac in the weeks ahead for more on both James Baldwin: Later Novels and Edith Wharton: Four Novels of the 1920s.
Library of America fans in the greater New York City area will want to know that the Film Society of Lincoln Center has just announced a comprehensive four-day film series dedicated to James Baldwin. “The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin on Film” runs from September 11 through 14 and will include compilations of Baldwin’s TV appearances as well as documentaries about him and in which he appeared, including a remastered edition of James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, Karen Thorsen’s much-lauded biographical portrait from 1989.
Baldwin fans will of course recognize the series’ title as a nod to The Devil Finds Work, his book-length 1976 meditation on American cinema and the myriad ways it shapes and embodies national attitudes on race. In tribute to that book, the Film Society will screen Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel, for which he expressed great admiration in his 1960 essay on Bergman, as well as Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones, the subject of some of Baldwin’s most withering commentary.
The Film Society’s retrospective arrives at a moment when Baldwin, who died in 1987, suddenly seems an all but ubiquitous presence in American cultural life. Readers can judge for themselves the extent to which current events in the U.S. confirm the enduring relevance of Baldwin’s critiques, but it’s clear the publication earlier this summer of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me has prompted a renewed interest in his work. (A blurb from Toni Morrison on the jacket of Between the World and Me names Coates as Baldwin’s intellectual heir.) The Library of America itself, for instance, has recently seen a dramatic spike in sales of its edition of Baldwin’s Collected Essays.
James Baldwin:
Later Novels
(September 2015)
Two weeks after the Film Society series, LOA makes another contribution to the Baldwin resurgence with the publication of James Baldwin: Later Novels, which collects three titles from the late ’60s and ’70s—Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Just Above My Head—that are overdue for reassessment by critics and general readers alike. If these books can be granted the kind of consideration that has long been given to earlier Baldwin novels like Go Tell It on the Mountain—and with the larger culture clearly more ready to engage with Baldwin’s explorations of sexual identity than it was in decades past—then it seems safe to assert that Baldwin isn’t so much enjoying a cultural “moment” as he is assuming his rightful position as one of the central American writers of the second half of the twentieth century.
The complete screening schedule for The Film Society of Lincoln Center series "The Devil Finds Work: James Baldwin on Film" is available at filmlinc.com. The Library of America publishes James Baldwin: Later Novels on September 29, 2015.
Related posts:
For the relaunch of our series of blog posts by contemporary fiction writers, essayists, poets, and historians, we reached out to Maggie Nelson to learn what classic works of American writing might have influenced her critically acclaimed new memoir The Argonauts.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. If you’re looking for an example of how to move between personal anecdote, trenchant political analysis, and urgent spiritual/ontological rumination, I doubt anyone bests Baldwin. His account of his meeting with Elijah Muhammad was, is, endlessly instructive to me, not only for its use of an encounter as a springboard for reflection, but also for Baldwin’s skill in saying exactly what he wants and needs to say without bending under the pressures of imagined readerships, some of whom might stand all too ready to misuse his critique. (I thought about this issue a lot when trying to figure out how to weight various critiques in The Argonauts.)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings. People love to talk about unclassifiable creative nonfiction as a recent invention, but what on God’s green earth are Emerson’s essays? Genre-wise, and sentence by sentence, they are some of the strangest, most inspiring pieces of nonfiction that I know. (Nietzsche thought so too—how’s that for mind-blowing.)
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. First published in 1981, this collection feels fresh, relevant, and necessary every time I pick it up. Whenever people complain to me about the so-called “ivory towerness” of theory, I advise them to revisit the “theory in the flesh” articulated in these pages, which proves how some—perhaps most—people who come to analyze the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality do so out of a need to make livable lives, and sometimes to survive.
David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. I read this book when it came out in 1991. I was eighteen, and had just come of age in San Francisco, a city ravaged by AIDS, but I hardly knew what the hell had happened, what was happening. This book helped me to understand everything—about AIDS, about the brutality of normalcy, about how rage might be mobilized to sublime effect in writing, about queerness, about mortality, about friendship, about how hallucinogenic, poetic accounts of roadside encounters might be paired with utterly fierce condemnations of this country’s politics, and so much more.
Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag
(Dell, 1966)
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation. Whenever I go back to my heavily annotated copy of Against Interpretation, I am appalled at how much of my thinking, and even my sentences, seem to me cribbed from Sontag. I guess I read Against Interpretation—an American classic of criticism if there ever was one—at a particularly molten moment in my development, when I was trying to figure out how to combine art and literary criticism, philosophy, and a certain speed or heat in my writing style. Sontag was so clearly already driving that car. I got in, and the rest is history.
Wayne Koestenbaum, My 1980s and Other Essays. Koestenbaum was my teacher once, and I remember very clearly his telling me: You have to get yourself to say upfront the unspeakable, indefensible thing; after that, you can spend the rest of the piece backpedaling or devoting yourself to nuance. But at least you’ve said it. I am endlessly in thrall to his mastery of this skill: his unsurpassable talent for assertion—hilarious, provocative, or perverse assertion—coupled with an appetite for / apprehension of nuance. I am edified by the range, verve, experiment, and energy of this collection, which makes me think there is a version of “American letters” that I could get behind.
Maggie Nelson's previous books include several volumes of poetry in addition to The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), a work of cultural criticism named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times. The Argonauts—a book whose form tests the boundaries of genre at the same time its content pushes against traditional gender definitions—has been called “vibrant, probing, and, most of all, outstanding” by NPR, and “a beautiful, passionate, and shatteringly intelligent meditation on what it means not to accept binaries” by the Chicago Tribune. Nelson lives in Los Angeles and currently teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts.
How to Read the Air
by Dinaw Mengestu
(Riverhead, 2010)
In our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry, Dinaw Mengestu, whose second novel, How to Read the Air, was published last October, describes the impact several American writers have had on his work.
Like many writers, I can’t help but wear my influences on my sleeve, and while those influences are many, and grow each year, I always think first and foremost of Saul Bellow. I read Bellow for the first time in high school, while living in Chicago. An old friend gave me his tattered paperback copy of The Adventures of Augie March and told me this is where I should begin if I wanted to be a writer. He was right in telling me that Augie March was the proper starting point, but he failed to mention how remarkable Bellow’s later novels were.
From Augie March I found my way to Herzog, a novel which even after multiple readings still astounds me with its density, humor, passion and love, and then later to Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, Henderson the Rain King, and finally to Bellow’s collected short stories. Of all the novels and characters though, it’s the mad, letter-writing Herzog who somehow manages to find his way into all my work, and to whom I return faithfully at least once a year.
Bellow was the first great writer to cement my conviction that there was nothing I wanted to do more in my life than write novels. Since then that conviction has been continually reinforced by other writers who may not share Bellow’s unique style, but in my opinion are equally great. Out of the many writers I would include in that list, the American novelists who come to mind first are:
What You See in the Dark
by Manuel Muñoz
(Algonquin Books, 2011)
Manuel Muñoz, whose debut novel, What You See in the Dark, was just published, joins our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry. He writes on how he encountered Gwendolyn Brooks’s novel, Maud Martha, in a class at Harvard.
Gwendolyn Brooks’s first (and only) novel, Maud Martha, came to me as a stack of photocopied pages from a local shop in Harvard Square. The book was out of print and available only in limited quantities, so the class trekked over to the shop to purchase the packet.
This was the early 1990s and the seminar on African-American women writers was led by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The class was filled mostly with young white women who spoke about Octavia Butler, Ann Petry, Nella Larsen, and Toni Morrison with a commanding authority that I could never place. I sat mostly in silence in that class, bristling at times at how easily some drifted into shaky political commentary, Professor Gates always guiding the seminar back to the solid foundation of the texts at hand.
Professor Gates called me into his office a few weeks into the seminar, along with a beautiful, beautiful young man of mixed heritage (who was the object of my silent crush). I could look neither of them in the eye, and when Professor Gates sat us down and asked why we were so reluctant to speak in class, I had no answer. On the way out, he said, “I need you to speak up.”
Today, February 18, marks the eightieth birthday of Toni Morrison, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, editor, and educator. In 1998 Morrison edited two volumes of James Baldwin’s works for The Library of America: Early Novels & Stories and Collected Essays. Although they were born just seven years apart, Morrison and Baldwin came from seemingly different generations of writers. They met in 1973 when Morrison was an editor at Random House and tried to sign Baldwin to a book deal. No contract ensued but they quickly became friends. “I dig Toni, and I trust her,” Baldwin wrote to his biographer David Adams Leeming.
Severely weakened by his battle with cancer, Baldwin spoke about Morrison to Quincy Troupe in November 1987, just three weeks before he died, in what would be his last interview:
Troupe: What do you think about Toni Morrison? Baldwin: Toni's my ally and it's really probably too complex to get into. She's a black woman writer, which in the public domain makes it more difficult to talk about. . . . Her gift is in allegory. Tar Baby is an allegory. In fact all her novels are. But they're hard to talk about in public. That's where you get in trouble because her books and allegory are not always what it seems to be about. I was too occupied with my recent illness to deal with Beloved. But in general she's taken a myth, or she takes what seems to be a myth, and turns it into something else. I don't know how to put this—Beloved could be about the story of truth. She's taken a whole lot of things and turned them upside down. Some of them—you recognize the truth in it. I think that Toni's very painful to read. Troupe: Painful? Baldwin: Yes. Because it's always or most times a horrifying allegory; but you recognize that it works. But you don't really want to march through it. Sometimes people have a lot against Toni, but she's got the most believing story of everybody—this rather elegant matron, whose intentions really are serious and, according to some people, lethal.
At Baldwin’s funeral service at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine on December 8, 1987, Morrison was one of several eulogists. Her remarks movingly described how indebted she felt to her friend:
The season was always Christmas with you there and . . . you did not neglect to bring at least three gifts. . . You gave me a language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention. . . . The second gift was your courage, which you let us share: the courage of one who could go as a stranger in the village and transform the distances between people into intimacy with the whole world. . . The third gift was hard to fathom and even harder to accept. It was your tenderness – a tenderness so delicate I thought it could not last, but last it did and envelop me it did.
You knew, didn’t you, how I needed your language and the mind that formed it? How I relied on your fierce courage to tame wildernesses for me? How strengthened I was by the certainty that came from knowing you would never hurt me? You knew, didn’t you, how I loved your love? You knew. This then is no calamity. No, This is jubilee. “Our crown,” you said, “has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do,” you said, “is wear it.”
In 1961 Harper’s Magazine commissioned James Baldwin to write a profile of Martin Luther King. Baldwin had first met King in 1958, a little more than a year after the Montgomery Bus Boycott (which King had helped lead) had ended in a federal decree outlawing desegregation on public buses. In “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King” Baldwin, once a teenage preacher himself, offers one of the most vivid and insightful accounts of what it was like to hear the twenty-nine-year-old King:
King is a great speaker. The secret of his greatness does not lie in his voice or his presence or his manner, though it has something to do with all these; nor does it lie in his verbal range or felicity, which are not striking; nor does he have any capacity for those stunning, demagogic flights of the imagination which bring an audience cheering to its feet. The secret lies, I think, in his intimate knowledge of the people he is addressing, be they black or white, and in the forthrightness with which he speaks of those things which hurt and baffle them. He does not offer any easy comfort and this keeps his hearers absolutely tense. He allows them their self-respect—indeed, he insists on it.
Most preachers, Baldwin notes, offer their congregation only “the sustenance for another day’s journey.” King by contrast made everyone who heard him feel they could “change their situation.” Baldwin quotes an example:
“. . . And we’ve got to stop lying to the white man. Every time you let the white man think you think segregation is right, you are co-operating with him in doing evil.
“The next time,” he said, “the white man asks you what you think of segregation, you tell him, Mr. Charlie, I think it’s wrong and I wish you’d do something about it by nine o’clock tomorrow morning!”
This brought a wave of laughter and King smiled, too. But he had meant every word he said, and he expected his hearers to act on them. They also expected this of themselves, which is not the usual effect of a sermon; and that they are living up to their expectations no white man in Montgomery will deny.
On the fifty-fifth anniversary of Rosa Parks’s historic decision not to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Donald Pennington asks:
... can we all have the courage of that one woman whom, though all alone, simply refused and stood her ground? When the moment of truth arrives in our lives, will we be as self-confident, defiant, and as beautiful as Rosa Parks?
In an essay in 1972 James Baldwin phrased a similar thought somewhat differently:
If Mrs. Parks had merely had a headache that day, and if the community had had no grievances, there would have been no bus boycott and we would never have heard of Martin Luther King.
Although the three riders next to her did give up their seats to white passengers, Rosa Parks refused. She chose to be arrested:
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
At the time of her arrest Parks had been a secretary for the NAACP in Montgomery, and E. D. Nixon, the local NAACP leader, quickly secured the services of a white lawyer to bail her out. King biographer Taylor Branch captures Nixon’s thoughts as he delivered her home:
Rosa Parks was without peer as a potential symbol for Montgomery’s Negroes—humble enough to be claimed by the common folk, and yet dignified enough in manner, speech, and dress to command the respect of the leading classes.
When Nixon asked her if she was willing to fight the case, Parks responded “If you think it will mean something to Montgomery and do some good, I’ll be happy to go along with it.” She was arrested on a Thursday. Over the weekend 35,000 handbills were distributed calling for a one-day bus boycott the following Monday, the day Parks was to be arraigned.
Martin Luther King Jr. later wrote of being called to the window by his wife early Monday morning:
As I approached the front window, Coretta pointed joyfully to a slowly moving bus. ‘Darling, it’s empty!’ I could hardly believe what I saw. I knew the South Jackson line, which ran past our house, carried more Negro passengers than any other line in Montgomery . . .
The Kings then knew the boycott would be a success. Later that day an assembly of local ministers created the Montgomery Improvement Association and elected twenty-six-year-old King its first president. That night thousands gathered in the Holt Street Baptist Church to decide whether the boycott should continue. This would be the occasion for King’s first historic speech:
Just the other day, just last Thursday to be exact, one of the finest citizens in Montgomery (Amen)—not one of the finest Negro citizens (That’s right), but one of the finest citizens in Montgomery—was taken from a bus (Yes) and carried to jail and arrested (Yes) because she refused to get up to give her seat to a white person. (Yes, that’s right) . . .
And you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. [Sustained applause]
Joe Abzell captured the aftermath in his report for The Montgomery Advertiser:
When the resolution on continuing the boycott of the bus was read, there came a wild whoop of delight. Many said they would never ride the bus again. . . The meeting was much like an old-fashioned revival with loud applause added. It proved beyond any doubt there was a discipline among Negroes that many whites had doubted. It was almost a military discipline combined with emotion.
The boycott lasted thirteen months and ended only when, in late December 1956, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s ruling outlawing segregation on Alabama buses.
Bobby Kennedy recently made me the soul-stirring promise that one day—thirty years if I'm lucky—I can be President too. It never entered this boy's mind, I suppose—it has not entered the country's mind yet—that perhaps I wouldn't want to be.... [W]hat really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro 'first' will become the first Negro president. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he will be president of?
What would Baldwin make of Obama’s America? This passage is vintage Baldwin, turning a question around to gain a new and provocative perspective. He did much the same trick in his famous riposte to a British television interviewer: “When you were starting out as a writer, you were black, impoverished, homosexual, you must have said to yourself, ‘Gee, how disadvantaged could I get?’” “No,” Baldwin snapped back, “I thought I hit the jackpot. It was so outrageous you could not go any further. I had to find out a way to use it.” (see 0:32 of YouTube video)
In his review of the new collection in The Los Angeles Times Lynell George expands on how momentous Baldwin's attitude was for American culture:
We hit the jackpot—all of us—anyone interested in engaging in candid albeit stakes-changing debate, anyone who had an investment in equity, humanity and its future. We gained tremendously from the variegated prism through which he viewed and translated the world.
From the late 1940s until his death in 1987, Baldwin walked into the very center of the maelstrom—whether it was the rhetorical theater of debate or the very front line of violence of the Jim Crow South—but he wasn't simply everywhere at once: He was deeply invested in each and every outcome.
As a writer of polemical essays on the Negro question James Baldwin has no equals. He probably has, in fact, no real competitors. The literary role he has taken on so deliberately and played with so agile an intelligence is one that no white writer could possibly imitate and that few Negroes, I imagine, would wish to embrace in toto.
Dupee then quotes a passage from The Fire Next Time:
Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices.
About this passage Dupee remarks: “Nobody else in democratic America writes sentences like this anymore. It suggests the ideal prose of an ideal literary community, some aristocratic France of one’s dreams.”
In “Universal Blues,” her review of the new collection for Columbia Journalism Review, Kimberly Chou tries to locate the source of Baldwin’s incantatory prose:
A preacher’s son, Baldwin grew up in Harlem as a teenage evangelist, entering the pulpit at fourteen and abandoning it three years later. In his nonfiction above all, one can see that the skill for oratory stayed with him—transferred to the page for a wider audience. His language could sometimes be baroque. Yet his message always cut straight through, even when his opinions were hard to swallow. The reader feels compelled to keep reading, no matter how raw or unapologetic the subject material.
Lynell George takes the measure of the breadth of Baldwin's achievement:
... what this volume underscores is Baldwin's immense cross-disciplinary range—as a reader, thinker, lecturer and pundit. Though race was a theme that was never out of arm's reach, his preoccupation with societal ethics and humanity was tantamount. And though, as Kenan points out in his evocative introduction, Baldwin first and foremost considered himself a novelist, it was the essays—particularly "The Fire Next Time" and "Notes of a Native Son" that cemented his fate, which [Kenan points out in the introduction] "transformed Baldwin into something more than a writer for the American public and world at large—if the Rev. 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."
Like many other writers, Baldwin felt the need to declare his independence from his literary forebears. The new book includes his savage review of Richard Wright’s Native Son, comparing it to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Wright had introduced Baldwin to the New York literati and their relationship never recovered.
In an interview with NPR, editor Kenan describes what he believes to be one of the reasons for Baldwin’s enduring appeal: “He lifts the veil,” Kenan says. “White people felt that they had an insight into black America that they didn't have before.”
