Understanding James Baldwin

By Marc Dudley

An analysis of the ground-breaking author's vision and thematic concerns

The Harlem-born son of a storefront preacher, James Baldwin died almost thirty years ago, but his spirit lives on in the eloquent and still-relevant musings of his novels, short stories, essays, and poems. What concerned him most—as a black man, as a gay man, as an American—were notions of isolation and disconnection at both the individual and communal level and a conviction that only in the transformative power of love could humanity find any hope of healing its spiritual and social wounds.

In Understanding James Baldwin, Marc K. Dudley shows that a proper grasp of Baldwin's work begins with a grasp of the times in which he wrote. During a career spanning the civil rights movement and beyond, Baldwin stood at the heart of intellectual and political debate, writing about race, sexual identity, and gendered politics, while traveling the world to promote dialogue on those issues. In surveying the writer's life, Dudley traces the shift in Baldwin's aspirations from occupying the pulpit like his stepfather to becoming a writer amid the turmoil of sexual self-discovery and the harsh realities of American racism and homophobia. The book's analyses of key works in the Baldwin canon—among them, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, "Sonny's Blues," Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Devil Finds Work—demonstrate the consistency, contrary to some critics' claims, of Baldwin's vision and thematic concerns.

As police violence against people of color, a resurgence in white supremacist rhetoric, and pushback against LGBTQ rights fill today's headlines, James Baldwin's powerful and often-angry words find a new resonance. From early on, Baldwin decried the damning potential of alienation and the persistent bigotry that feeds it. Yet, even as it sometimes wavered, his hope for both the individual and the nation remained intact. In the present historical moment, James Baldwin matters more than ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781611179651

Marc Dudley

Marc K. Dudley is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University, specializing in both twentieth-century American literature and African American literature. The author of Bloodlines and the Color Line: Hemingway, Race, and Art, he has also published in the Hemingway Review and is coeditor of the forthcoming Teaching Hemingway and Film.

Book preview

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931–2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.

As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, "the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed." Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers—explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives—and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.

In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli’s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.

Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor

CHAPTER 1

Understanding James Baldwin

Columbus was discovered by what he found.

James Baldwin, Imagination

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

James Baldwin, The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman

At forty James Baldwin was already midway through a stellar career when he collaborated with a high school friend turned professional photographer, Richard Avedon, to create a kind of visual poetry he entitled Nothing Personal. The title would prove to be both overtly ironic and a harbinger of things to come. In crafting these essays with pictures, Baldwin was interested in pursuing one principal angle: the isolation of the human soul, or as biographer W. J. Weatherby suggested, alienation of people, what keeps them apart.¹ Several of Baldwin’s early works had aptly dealt with this same theme, and Baldwin would wrestle with the complications of human relations his entire literary life. In doing so, he simply continued the ongoing conversation that so many writers before him had started. Not the least of these conversations were those begun by Charles Dickens a century before him: It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…. we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree comparison only. So begins Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. As a child, James Baldwin loved Dickens; as an adult, Baldwin lived Dickens, championing his own brand of justice for a world he saw falling woefully short of its grand potential.² Even when he was not front and center as champion, James Baldwin was a witness.

While much has been made of his youthful adoration of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (his mother purportedly hid his well-worn copy from him to save his eyes) and his more cynical reading of it years later, comparatively little has been said about his attraction to Dickens. In his reflective years, Baldwin would become more fully appreciative of the imprint Dickens’s writing would have on his own worldview. In fact, reflecting on his career’s major influences at its midpoint in 1970, Baldwin succinctly conjured his holy trinity: Formative influences: my father, the Church, and Charles Dickens.³ It only seems appropriate that this volume on James Baldwin should begin with allusions to Dickens. Few opening lines of any novel are more iconic than those opening Dickens’s 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities. Moreover, few opening lines encapsulate so precisely the state of the world in both Dickens’s day and, by extension, Baldwin’s. Dickens transports his readers to eighteenth-century France and paints a world born of radical change. The year 1789 was a touchstone, marking the Bastille’s storming and revolution in France. It also marked George Washington’s election to the office of American president, legitimizing a new nation. The publication year of A Tale of Two Cities, 1859, was a year of sea change as Charles Darwin publicly posited his natural selection theories in Origin of the Species, and across the Atlantic, John Brown was hanged after a failed slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, marking the beginning of the end of the American union. In December of the very next year, South Carolina seceded from the union, and just months after that, Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter, sending America headlong into its own civil war. Dickens as nineteenth-century reporter and prophet could not be more prescient; his words reverberate a century later.

James Baldwin could have borrowed from Dickens in writing about the present world, too. The second decade of this young century has been both the best and the worst of times. The new millennium has witnessed the striking down of DOMA, the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (introduced to legally disallow same-sex unions), in 2015. Conversely, since then a flurry of legislative activity at the state level worked to curb civil liberties for those in the LGBTQ community. The summer of 2015 also saw the continuation of a long black song of bloodshed, of conflict between police and black America and renewed media conversation surrounding an age-old issue. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Sandra Bland: all victims of racially charged police brutality. South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney was among nine shot dead by a self-professed executioner of racial law at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church that summer. In the span of months, race riots erupted in Ferguson, Missouri; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore Maryland. The following year Philando Castille in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana joined the victims list, and it only grows longer and the tragedy only deepens. Each of these incidents serves as a touchstone in the ongoing conversation about race in America. James Baldwin helped initiate that conversation over a half century ago. Although he died in 1987, Baldwin’s continued relevance in the new millennium, decades after he last spoke to America, cannot be overstated. Baldwin’s eloquent, sermonic, spiritual musings find a new resonance in today’s sociopolitical culture.

In today’s headlines one sees the very same issues that pressed hard on his mind all those years ago—years during which Rosa Parks engaged in quiet protest as she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama; Emmett Louis Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman; Martin Luther King, Jr., marched on the Washington Mall for freedom; and gay demonstrators rioted in New York’s Greenwich Village over discriminatory practices. Gay rights and issues of race, issues of the color line—what W. E. B. Du Bois insisted would be the dominant twentieth-century issue—are certainly still at the forefront of issues facing twenty-first-century America. The United States Supreme Court’s recent rulings on the Defense of Marriage Act, the recent wave of state supreme court decisions allowing for the civil union of same-sex couples, an immediate conservative backlash, and the spate of violence directed at people of color by police (the tiny city of Ferguson, Missouri, was little known before 2014’s police shooting of a black teenager) all attest to the timelessness of Baldwin’s prophetic words. Baldwin knew the truth in Du Bois’s prophesy early on, knew it was and that it would be so unless America confronted the demons that haunt it. If you can describe it, whatever it is, Baldwin once suggested, describe it. You are not at the mercy of something you don’t understand. If you can describe it, you can outlive it.⁴ That said, this volume on James Arthur Baldwin for the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series is long overdue.

Marking what would have been his ninetieth year, New York City proclaimed 2014 the year of James Baldwin and rightly so. Born in Harlem in 1924, James Baldwin was a child of New York. And although his life journey took him to worlds far away, Harlem was always on his mind. After all, Harlem Hospital welcomed him into the world, and he spent his early years playing in alleys off Park Avenue, but not the Park Avenue of American aspiration. His Park Avenue was uptown Park Avenue, littered with trash and peopled by those enduring the pangs of poverty. This was Baldwin’s New York.

Baldwin was the eldest of nine children and spent the better part of his early years tending to siblings and dreaming of a world beyond familial obligation. He liked to say that he spent his youth taking his brothers and sisters over with one hand and holding a book with the other.⁵ As a teenager, he would spend three years in training as a boy preacher, dispensing the gospel at a Harlem storefront church. Hundreds of such venues dotted the city during the 1920s, and the cloth culture permeated all of life. Always, though, the outside, secular world played the part of temptress to his righteous resolve. Movie houses offered an escape and a window to glitz and glamour, while the grime of the streets offered excitement. A personal fieldtrip to the public library facilitated by a grade-school teacher who saw in young James much promise would transform him. As Baldwin recalled in his later years in interviews for the Paris Review, during those formative years, I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen.⁶ Books consumed him and placed him in direct competition with his gospel proselytizing and with his stepfather, David.

Born the son of Emma Berdis Jones of Maryland, young Baldwin would never know his real father; he would say later that he never truly knew his stepfather either. He would, however, know the passion and the pain of a stepfather who was relentlessly severe, distant, and bitter. David Baldwin, Sr., day laborer and self-fashioned preacher, was born in the Deep South, the son of slaves, and he spent the bulk of his life remembering and reliving that history. He led an austere existence and spent his adult years in perpetual defiance, unwilling to bend to white will and expectation. His son James would remark that this white will broke him in the end. David Baldwin would spend the duration of his days as head of household preaching his gospel, rebuking the white man for his dominion over this world and admonishing his family to avoid it altogether. He would spend his final days embittered, frail and in poor health, on the brink of lunacy.

Following his stepfather’s death, James Baldwin spent the rest of his years, and indeed the entirety of his literary career, getting to know this man with whom he seemed to share little outside of an adoptive name. Thus, James Baldwin’s writing becomes a grand exercise in identity making. The paternal image became an appropriate metaphor for his relationship to his nation as a gay man, a black man, an American dispossessed. Whether it is an essay, a short story, a novel, or a poem, each of Baldwin’s aesthetic exercises was an exorcism of sorts, as he sifted through personal experience and reconciled differences. Each scripted text became an act of confession. Baldwin was, after all, the son of a preacher man. Understanding James Baldwin begins there.

Baldwin’s formative years at home in Harlem and in the church would shape much of his life and career. That early life was a tortured one, with a stepfather lording over his son closely and the outside world beckoning him perpetually. However, in the summer of 1938, the universe interceded on his behalf; Baldwin had a religious conversion that transformed his life and consciousness. The seeds of Baldwin’s literary career were sown on the threshing floor when he was a teen. In fact, wrote James Campbell, "he two books which are often taken as his best—the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain and the essay The Fire Next Time—center on this moment."⁷

James Baldwin became bona fide at fourteen. He became a junior preacher and for three years he proselytized at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly Church. During this time, he would seek inspiration from Father Divine (whose Peace Mission movements provided for the needy), Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and later a Harlem legislative representative, and Mother Horne, all preachers who had achieved a certain celebrity. Each also represented ties to home for Baldwin. All the while he dreamed of engaging with the world at large with a pencil and paper. The world won out. Encouragement from teachers such as Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen at P.S. 139, also called Frederick Douglass Junior High, confirmed what the young boy already knew. Within two years of donning his evangelical robe, young James realized where his true passions were and where they were not; the church was not his home. Keenly self-aware as a teen, Baldwin came to see the church as a convenient crutch whose sole purpose, were he to continue, would be to help him hide himself from the world, risk nothing, and deny himself in the process. Aptly enough, his last sermon as a preacher was entitled Set thy House in Order. As Baldwin biographer David Leeming suggested, for Baldwin it was always a critical choice between a certain safety and an all-out engagement with all of life.⁸ And while his tenure at the pulpit did not last beyond his seventeenth year, its imprint on him as would-be artist proved indelible.

One hears reverberations of those very formative years in his writing; Baldwin’s language, always informed by the sermonic tradition, is undulating, grandiose, allusive, epic. Further, he wrote with a proselyte’s fervor, his aspirations always nothing short of a reader’s total conversion. Baldwin’s introductory description of young black boy John’s religious conversion, as witnessed by his mother, Elizabeth, in Go Tell It On the Mountain is a case in point: As now, in the sudden silence, she heard him cry: not the cry of the child, newborn, before the common light of earth; but the cry of the man-child, bestial, before the light comes down from Heaven…. On the threshing-floor, in the center of the crying, singing saints, John lay astonished beneath the power of the Lord.⁹ Whether his subject matter is spiritual or secular, everywhere are the audible tracings of scripture.

Thematically, too, Baldwin repeatedly revisited the pulpit as he perpetually explored the relationship between father and (prodigal) son. He consistently mined memory and personal experience, always underscoring the import of lineage, of belonging, of home. Additionally, Baldwin protagonists often harbor secrets that threaten to consume them and most certainly alienate them. Confession, therefore, becomes an integral part of many a Baldwin text, as characters look to assuage a guilty conscience or else reconcile the gulf that separates them from others. Baldwin characters constantly negotiate with these secrets, with conscience, with histories that haunt, as they look to save themselves. Perhaps, then, the most pervasive of Baldwin’s themes is salvation, and salvation is only possible through a realization of love. It is probably why an exploration of this thing called love, in its several iterations—this is Baldwin’s profane equivalent of the Holy Ghost—permeates so much of the writer’s work. He took on the mantel of a profane prophet, melding real and metaphysical. Baldwin saw the artist’s charge as being that of a naturalist preacher, at once acknowledging the forces at work in the world, yet artfully, hopefully, endorsing the human spirit’s potential. In so doing, an artist is to show human nature as it is, frail and vulnerable; to expose the ugliness, the sinfulness, of the world all around him; and to offer a salve for spiritual and psychic wounds born of living. In the end, always, the salve proffered is love. Baldwin began crafting this aesthetic prescription very early in his career.

Already as a boy, Baldwin had aspirations of writing the world. Winning a church prize in grade school and later garnering the adulation of high school friends, Baldwin knew from his earliest days that he was destined for authorship. Unfortunately but appropriately, Baldwin’s early aesthetic yearnings would come into direct conflict with his father’s more spiritual mandates. Amid these pangs, Baldwin’s true artistry was born. His familial conflicts, complicated by a burgeoning homosexuality, helped lay the groundwork for a formal aesthetic founded upon empathetic principles that would define the writer for decades.

At fourteen and already at a crossroads in his life, preparing for a life behind the pulpit, Baldwin made the prescient declaration that he wished to be numbered among the great artists of [his] race. He cultivated that talent early with encouragement from his principal and teachers (including Cullen) at P.S. 124, where he became editor-in-chief of the school paper, the Pilot. Cullen took a special interest in guiding the boy, recognizing both his talent and his vulnerability, and his unspoken yearning for a father figure. Years later he was admitted into DeWitt Clinton High School, a more affluent school in the Bronx, where he mingled with the mainly white, Jewish student body, and talked all things literary. He became a fixture in the school’s newspaper, the Magpie. Several of his school friendships would last a lifetime, and a handful he would cultivate into long-lasting artistic alliances. He would cowrite a play with editor Sol Stein and collaborate on a book project with photographer Richard Avedon. But it was his friendship with painter Beauford Delaney, forged when Baldwin was just sixteen years old, that would leave the greatest impression on him. Baldwin credited Delaney with literally showing him the light, impressing upon him deliberate aesthetic techniques regarding light usage in his own medium, and exposing him to the music of his people; Delaney drew sustenance and inspiration from vernacular music. From him Baldwin learned the rhythms of jazz and blues, along with an entire cultural aesthetic steeped in notions of spiritual suffering and redemption. Baldwin would imbue his own writing with this sensibility for the entirety of his career.

That career began in earnest with the publication of his first novel in 1953. It was well received and helped establish Baldwin as a burgeoning literary force. In actuality, his success was a long time coming. The publication of Go Tell It on the Mountain and its commercial and critical success were preceded by several years of dissatisfying toil, soul searching, and paying necessary dues. In 1943, in what would be a year of sea change for Baldwin, his stepfather died, and on the very day of his funeral, Harlem rioted. Both events would set young Baldwin down a path both private and public. This would include making peace with the revelation that the man he called daddy was in fact not his biological father, that man he might never know. His stepfather he might, but only after much soul-searching. Shortly after graduating high school, partly at the prompting of artist friends, many of them white, Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village to be closer to what nourished his soul: art. Already in the 1940s, New York’s art scene thrived there. In the Village, he communed with musicians, visual artists, and, of course, other writers. And here is where the seeds of that first novel were planted and nurtured. However, he would pick up and put down the pen multiple times during his years there, never quite being able to gain traction as he looked to translate those early pulpit experiences.

To pay bills during these hungry years, Baldwin took odd jobs. He was a restaurant waiter, an elevator operator, and layer of railroad track. This last work detail