BALDWIN, James (Arthur)

Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 2 August 1924. Education: Public School 139, Harlem, New York, and DeWitt Clinton High School, Bronx, New York, graduated 1942. Career: Worked as handyman, dishwasher, waiter, and office boy in New York and in defense work, Belle Meade, New Jersey, in early 1940s; full-time writer from 1943; lived in Europe, mainly in Paris, 1948-56. Actors Studio, New York, National Advisory Board of CORE and National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Awards: Saxton fellowship, 1945; Rosenwald fellowship, 1948; Guggenheim fellowship, 1954; American Academy award, 1956; Ford fellowship, 1958; National Conference of Christians and Jews Brotherhood award, 1962; George Polk award, 1963; Foreign Drama Critics award, 1964; Martin Luther King. Jr., award (City University of New York), 1978. D.Litt.: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1963. Member: American Academy, 1964. Died: 30 November 1987.

Publications

Collections

Collected Essays. 1998.

Early Novels and Stories. 1998.

Short Stories

Going to Meet the Man. 1965.

Novels

Go Tell It on the Mountain. 1953.

Giovanni's Room. 1956.

Another Country. 1962.

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone. 1968.

If Beale Street Could Talk. 1974.

Just above My Head. 1979.

Plays

The Amen Corner (produced 1955). 1968.

Blues for Mister Charlie (produced 1964). 1964.

One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." 1972.

A Deed from the King of Spain (produced 1974).

Screenplay:

The Inheritance, 1973.

Poetry

Jimmy's Blues: Selected Poems. 1983.

Other

Notes of a Native Son. 1955.

Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. 1961.

The Fire Next Time. 1963.

Nothing Personal, photographs by Richard Avedon. 1964.

A Rap on Race, with Margaret Mead. 1971.

No Name in the Street. 1972.

A Dialogue: Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. 1973.

Little Man, Little Man (for children). 1976.

The Devil Finds Work: An Essay. 1976.

The Price of a Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985. 1985.

The Evidence of Things Not Seen. 1985.

Conversations, edited by Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt. 1989.

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Bibliography:

"Baldwin: A Checklist 1947-1962" by Kathleen A. Kindt, and "Baldwin: A Bibliography 1947-1962" by Russell G. Fischer, both in Bulletin of Bibliography, January-April 1965; Baldwin: A Reference Guide by Fred L. and Nancy Standley, 1979.

Critical Studies:

The Furious Passage of Baldwin by Fern Eckman, 1966; Baldwin: A Critical Study by Stanley Macebuh, 1973; Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Keneth Kinnamon, 1974; Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation edited by Therman B. O'Daniel, 1977; Baldwin by Louis H. Pratt, 1978; Baldwin by Carolyn W. Sylvander, 1980; Baldwin: Three Interviews by Kenneth B. Clark and Malcolm King, 1985; Black Women in the Fiction of Baldwin by Trudier Harris, 1985; Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of Baldwin by Horace Porter, 1988; Baldwin: Artist on Fire by W.J. Weatherby, 1989; Baldwin: The Legacy edited by Quincy Troupe, 1989; Talking at the Gates: A Life of Baldwin by James Campbell, 1991; New Essays on Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1996; James Baldwin: Voice from Harlem by Ted Gottfried, 1997; The Critical Reception of James Baldwin in France by Rosa Bobia, 1997.

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James Baldwin has achieved his main impact as a novelist, as a playwright, and, above all, as an essayist. But his short stories, though inspired by similar sources of human injustice as his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and in his plays Blues for Mister Charlie, which deal with the Emmett Till case (the acquittal of whites for the murder of a black accused of flirting with a white woman), and The Amen Corner, are no mere chippings from Baldwin's literary workshop. They are among the most powerful and well-constructed stories to come out of the twentieth century.

The stories that make up Baldwin's early collection Going to Meet the Man begin with two fictionalized recollections of his fundamentalist preacher father and his own three teenage years spent as a Holy Roller preacher. In "The Rockpile" the child can never be forgiven his illegitimacy. "The Outing" describes a steamboat excursion on the Hudson river organized by the Mount Olives Pentecostal Assembly, which held a service on board full of glory "Hallelujahs" and convictions of the benefits of having been "saved." But strange conflicts are aroused in the minds of some of the adolescent boys. It was as if

the animal, so vividly restless and undiscovered, so tense with power, ready to spring, had been already stalked and trapped and offered, a perpetual blood-sacrifice, on the altar of the Lord. Yet their bodies continued to change and grow, preparing them, mysteriously and with ferocious speed, for manhood. No matter how careful their movements, these movements suggested, with a distinctness dreadful for the redeemed to see, the pagan lusting beneath the blood-washed robes.

In "The Man Child" the murderously jealous Jamie, a failed farmer whose farm his friend Eric has bought, is unable to resist the sense of immortality successive generations bring, and he tragically kills his friend's son.

The out-of-work black actor reveals Baldwin's central concern when, in "Previous Condition," he tells his Jewish friend, "Oh, I know you're Jewish, you get kicked around, too, but you can walk into a bar and nobody knows you're Jewish and if you go looking for a job you'll get a better job than mine!… I know everybody's in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don't understand it and don't want to spend all my life trying to forget it?"

The most stylishly written story is "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon," in which a black singer/movie star, who made his name in a French film and who married a Swedish girl, plans to take his wife and son to America. It contains a satirical explanation of why white Americans are seemingly always so nice to each other, as well as the humiliating image of a black girl being forced to stand in front of police car headlights, drop her pants, and lift up her dress allegedly to convince the white police she really was black. It also contains an evocative description of the sounds of New York:

The thing which most struck me was neither light nor shade, but noise. It came from a million things at once, from trucks and tires and clutches and brakes and doors; from machines shutting and stamping and rolling and cutting and pressing; from the building of tunnels, the checking of gas works, the laying of wires, the digging of foundations … from the battering down and the rising up of walls; from millions of radios and television sets and juke boxes. The human voices distinguished themselves from the roar only by their note of stress and hostility.

A less stable relationship is depicted in "Come Out of the Wilderness," where a black girl in love with a white man gradually faces up to the knowledge that eventually he will leave her. The title story of Going to Meet the Man builds into a horrifying description of the mutilation and murder of a black man by a gang of whites and the dreadful effect the spectacle has on the gloating whites who witness it, a story the force and ferocity of which no reader is ever likely to forget.

B. de Mott has described Baldwin as "one of the few genuinely indispensable American writers." And so, surely, he is. He explains the condition of being black in a predominantly white society to that society's majority with sharp analytical accuracy, a lack of rancor, and a passion that never descends to self-pity. His attitude is well summed up in the introduction he wrote to the volume of his collected nonfiction, The Price of a Ticket:

The will of the people of the State, is revealed by the State's institutions. There was not then (in 1943) nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution. And most institutions—the unions, for one example, the Church, for another, and the Army—or the Military—for yet another, are meant to keep the nigger in his place. Yes: we have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white. And what it appears to surrender with one hand, it obstinately clutches with the other.

Baldwin spent nearly a decade in Europe—Giovanni's Room, his second novel, is set in the bohemian world of the 1950s—before returning to his home country to associate himself with the Civil Rights movement and express "the alienation, the despair, the rage, the reality" of what it meant to be black in the United States. He writes with a focused detachment that perhaps derives from his European experience—as in the novel Another Country and The Fire Next Time. At any rate, in his short stories, as in his plays, his novels, his essays, and occasional journalism, he probes relentlessly at the sources of what makes for disadvantagedness, often using images and phrases that alike surprise by their rightness and startle by their equal application to the horrors whites also inflict on other whites. There is no attempt to exploit the pain of things. It is simply there, stated, as reflected in the music of "Sonny's Blues":

All I know about music is that not many people hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and the imposing order on it as it hits the air.

Hearing the roar rising from the void without imposing order on it could be an apt description of James Baldwin's powerful and permanent contribution to American literature. As Baldwin himself writes, in a later moment from the same story, he is aware that every experience is "only a moment, that the world waited outside … and the trouble stretched above us, larger than the sky."

—Maurice Lindsay

See the essays on "Sonny's Blues" and "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon."