James Baldwin

From Philosopedia

Baldwin, James Arthur (2 August 1924 - 1 December 1987)

Born James Arthur Jones in New York City's Harlem Hospital, Baldwin was an illegitimate child who never knew his biological father.

In 1927 his mother � Emma Berdis Joynes � married a Baptist preacher, David Baldwin, and together they reared eight other children. In No Name in the Street (1972), Baldwin wrote that his mother "scarcely belonged to us: she was always in the hospital, having another baby."� As for his stepfather, a Baptist minister "with his unreciprocated love for the Great God Almighty, it is no wonder our father went mad."�

Young Baldwin read everything he could get his hands on "except the Bible, probably because it was the only book I was encouraged to read."� When fourteen, he had a religious conversion and began preaching as a Pentecostal minister. But, as he wrote in The Devil Finds Work (1976), "At this time of my life, Emile was the only friend I had who knew to what extent my ministry tormented me."�

So he left home and worked at a New Jersey defense plant, then at a Manhattan meatpacking plant, all the time enduring intolerable racism. By the age of nineteen he had become a Trotskyist, finding it useful because he "learned that it may be impossible to indoctrinate me."� Moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, Baldwin left his religion and became a bohemian. Upon meeting Richard Wright got a job editing material for a publisher. He also wrote reviews for Nation. In 1948 he used money from a literary fellowship to go to Paris, where Richard Wright was helpful in finding contacts for him and where he happily found little or no racism.

Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953) relates how John at the age of thirteen is "saved"� in the Baptist church where his father preaches and where the hero suffers from his blackness and his gayness:

• His father had always said his face was the face of Satan, and was there not something in the lift of the eyebrow, in the way his rough hair formed a V on his brow that bore witness to his father's words. In the eye there was a light that was not the light of Heaven, and the mouth trembled, lustful and lewd, to drink deep in the winds of Hell.

As has been pointed out by The New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als, "John cannot understand why his father despises him, because the fact that the father despises himself does not occur to John. Nor can John imagine being able to escape him: there will never be any reprieve from the memory of his cruelty and its effect."�

Baldwin's work includes Giovanni's Room (1956), in which he described his homosexuality; Another Country (1962), Notes of a Native Son (1955), and Just Above my Head (1979).

Baldwin was a leader not only in the black civil rights movement but also a strong supporter of gay rights. Americans, he felt, were "still trapped in a history they do not understand," that they needed to break out of their false view of reality. The myth of white superiority was in Baldwin's mind the most important, and most destructive, of the many myths that informed American culture. He did not dislike whites, however, preferring them as lovers. A Swiss, Lucien Happesberger, was his great lover but was primarily attracted to women, adding to Baldwin's feelings of the "love withheld"� he had experienced throughout his childhood.

The Fire Next Time (1963), wrote Als,

• detailed Baldwin's evangelical upbringing and his views on Christianity as a form of slavery forced on and then embraced by blacks: oppression as the condition of black American life. In order to escape "the ghetto mentality"� and be a "truly:� moral human being, it was necessary for anyone, white or black, to first "divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.

Eldridge Cleaver in a homophobic attack, Soul on Ice, called Baldwin "the white man's most valuable tool in oppressing other blacks." Norman Mailer found Baldwin "too charming a writer to be major." Richard Wright, however, called Baldwin "the greatest black writer in the world."

But by 1962, upon publication of his Another Country and the essay collection Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin was his nation's leading black literary star. "But in the end,"� as Als has described, "Baldwin could not distinguish between writing sermons and making art. He eventually returned to the pulpit just where his stepfather had always wanted him to be."� Unpublished work will reveal more of Baldwin, he predicted

while lamenting that Baldwin's relatives are still sensitive about his homosexuality and are reluctant to reclaim wholly their bastard relative.

A freethinker, Baldwin subscribed to publications of the British Humanist Association.

Having renounced his beliefs at age 17, Baldwin thought Christianity was unbelievable. He also found no love in black Christian groups, just hatred and self-loathing. Upon seeing Elijah Muhammad, the founder of the National of Islam, Baldwin found his beliefs about "white devils" equally absurd. Asked by Elijah about his religion, Baldwin explained, "I left the church 20 years ago and haven't joined anything since." "What are you now?" Elijah asked. "Now? I? Nothing" Baldwin replied.

Baldwin, who died from stomach or esophagus cancer in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, and was buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.

Works

• Go Tell It on the Mountain (semi-autobiographical novel; 1953)
• The Amen Corner (play; 1954)
• Notes of a Native Son (essays; 1955)
• Giovanni's Room (novel; 1956)
• Nobody Knows My Name|Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (essays; 1961)
• Another Country (novel)|Another Country (novel; 1962)
• A Talk to Teachers (essay; 1963)
• The Fire Next Time (essays; 1963)
• Blues for Mister Charlie (play; 1964)
• Going to Meet the Man (stories; 1965) published in the UK by Michael Joseph, dustjacket designed by David Battle.
• Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (novel; 1968)
• No Name in the Street (essays; 1972)
• If Beale Street Could Talk (novel; 1974)
• The Devil Finds Work (essays; 1976)
• Just Above My Head (novel; 1979)
• Jimmy's Blues (poems; 1983)
• The Evidence of Things Not Seen (essays; 1985)
• The Price of the Ticket (essays; 1985)
• The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (essays; 2010)

{AA; Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 16 February 1998; DGC; TRI; TYD}