James Baldwin

American writer, noted for his novels on sexual and personal identity, and sharp essays on civil-rights struggle in the United States. Baldwin also wrote three plays, a children's storybook, and a book of short stories. He gained fame with his first novel, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (1953), a story of hidden sins, guilt, and religious torments. In this and subsequent works Baldwin fused autobiographical material with analysis of social injustice and prejudices. Several of his novels dealt with homosexual liaisons.

"If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sigh, No more water, the fire next time!" (from The Fire Next Time, 1963) James Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, as the son of a domestic worker. Illegitimate, he never knew his own father and was brought up in great poverty. When he was three, his mother married a factory worker, a hard and cruel man, who also was storefront preacher. Baldwin adopted the surname from his stepfather, who died eventually in a mental hospital in 1943. In his childhood Baldwin was a voracious reader. When he was about twelve his first story appeared in a church newspaper. At the age of 17 Baldwin left his home. After graduation from high school, he worked in several ill-paid jobs and started his literary apprenticeship.

"And it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son, I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to my father's vision; very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When his life had ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in anew way, to be apprehensive about my own." (from Notes of a Native Son, 1955) In the early 1940s Baldwin was in defense work in Belle Meade, New Jersey, and in 1943 he began writing full-time. His book about the store-front churches in Harlem with the photographer Theodore Pelatowski did not gain success. In 1945 he had his first encounter with the FBI, in Woodstock, where he was living in a cabin the the woods. He was interrogated by two men about a deserter. Baldwin had met him at a party, very briefly, and gave the agents the name, Teddy. Afterwards Baldwin felt like being gang-raped, "but they made me hate them, too, with a hatred like hot ice..." (from The Devil Finds Work, 1976)

"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it." (Baldwin in Collected Essays, 1998) Although publishers rejected his work, Baldwin's book reviews and essays in The New Leader, The Nation, Commentary, and Partisan Review, together with the help of Richard Wright, won him a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1948. Baldwin's strained relations with his stepfather, problems over sexual identity, suicide of a friend, and racism drove him in 1948 to Paris and London. During this period Baldwin finished the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain and wrote the play THE AMEN CORNER (1955). He lived in Europe ten years, mainly in Paris and Istanbul, and later spent long periods in New York. In 1957 he returned to the U.S. in order to become involved in the Southern school desegregation struggle.

Go Tell It on the Mountain was based on the author's experiences as a teenage preacher in a small church. Baldwin had found release from his poor surroundings through a Pentecostal church. He was converted at age fourteen and is the chuch he served as a minister for three years. Baldwin depicted two days in the life of the Grimes family. The 14-year- old John is a good student, religious, and sensitive. "Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself." He has a long series of conflicts with his brutal stepfather, Gabriel, a preacher, who had fathered an illegitimate child in his youth. His mother has her own secrets. John's spiritual awakening unites the family but only superficially - John becomes ready to carry his own weight.

Feelings of strangeness and helpless anger troubled Baldwin during his years in Europe. In an essay, 'Stranger in the Village' (1953), he depicts his visit to a tiny Swiss village. He realizes that the people of the village cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world. The children consider him an exotic rarity and shout Neger! Neger! in the streets without being aware of his reaction under the smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you routine. Despite the saluts and bonsoirs, which Baldwin changed with his neighbors, he also sees in their eyes paranoiac malevolence - there is no European innocence, and the ideas which American beliefs are based on, originated form Europe. "For this village brings home to me this fact: that there was a day, and not really a very distant day, when Americans were scarcely Americans at all but discontented Europeans, facing a great unconquered continent and strolling, say, into a marketplace and seeing black men for the first time."

In Baldwin's second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM (1956), the theme was a man's struggle with his homosexuality. David, the narrator, tells his story on a single night. He is a young, bisexual American, Giovanni is his Italian lover, who is to be executed as a murderer, and Hella his would-be wife. "But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life." NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME (1962), a collections of essays, explored among others black-white relations in the U.S., William Faulkner's views on segregation, and Richard Wright's work. Wright had encouraged Baldwin when he was an aspiring writer but they never became close friends.

The book became a bestseller as THE FIRE NEXT TIME (1963), in which the author appraised the Black Muslim (Nation of Islam) movement, and warned that violence would result if white America does not change its attitudes toward black Americans. Baldwin's reports on the civil rights activities of the 1960s made him special target of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, that alone accumulated a 1750-page file on him. In the title essay of NOTES OF A NATIVE SON (1955) Baldwin took examples from his own family and the Harlem riot of 1943 to describe the experience of growing up black in America. ANOTHER COUNTRY (1962), a novel, was criticized for its thin characters. The protagonist is a black jazz drummer, who kills himself in despair after disappointments in love and life.

TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN'S BEEN GONE (1968) was according to Mario Puzo "a simpleminded, one-dimensional novel with mostly cardboard characters" (The New York Times, June 23, 1968). Again Baldwin had an artist as the protagonist: he is now Leo Proudhammer, a famous actor. Leo's early years in Harlem are depicted in flashbacks. He shares in Greenwich Village a living space with a white, unmarried couple, Barbara and Jerry. Leo and Barbara become lovers but ultimately Leo gains a new life through his love for a young black militant named Christopher, a Malcolm X-like figure.

"Joyce is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." (from 'Stranger in the Village') After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 and drawbacks in civil-rights movement, Baldwin started bitterly to acknowledge that violence may be the only route to racial justice. Some optimism about peaceful progress would later return, but in the early 1970s he also suffered from writer's block. In a review of Alex Haley's novel Roots Baldwin looked the work through the possibilities of a presidential election year and stated that "the black people of this country bear a mighty responsibility--which, odd as it may sound, is nothing new--and face an immediate future as devastating, though in a different way, as the past which has led us here: I am speaking of the beginning of the end of the black diaspora, which mean that I am speaking of the beginning of the end of the world as we have suffered it until now" (The New York Times, September 26, 1976). IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK (1974) showed Baldwin's artistic renewal in a moving and poetic love story of a young talented sculptor, Alonzo Hunt, called Fonny, and his pregnant girlfriend, Tish, the narrator. Fonny is twenty-two, Tish is nineteen. He is accused of a rape, but he is innocent, and Tish struggles to get him free. Baldwin emphasized the importance of family bonds and the simple power love as a means of survival.

Music, which played a minor role in Go Tell It on the Mountain, moved to the fore in JUST ABOVE MY HEAD (1979), Baldwin's sixth and longest novel. It focused on the lives of a group of friends, who start out preaching and singing in Harlem churches. Among the central characters is Arthur Montana, a gospel singer. Arthur's story, the decline of his career, is told by his brother Hall, whose balanced middle-class life is far from the religious turmoils of the Grimes family. African American music in general influenced deeply Baldwin, which is seen also from the titles of his books and their allusions to traditional African American songs. EVIDENCE OF THE THINGS SEEN (1983) was an account of unsolved murder of 28 black children in Atlanta in 1980 and 1981. The work, written mostly as an assignment for Playboy, again disappointed the critics.

In 1983 Baldwin became Five College Professor in the Afro-American Studies department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He spent his latter years in St. Paul de Vence on the Riviera, France, where he died of stomach cancer on November 30, 1987.

For further reading: The Furious Passage of James Baldwin by F. Eckman (1966); James Baldwin, ed. by Keneth Kinnamon (1974); James Baldwin, ed. by Therman O'Daniel (1975); James Baldwin, A Reference Guide by Fred L. Standley (1979); Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin by Horace A. Porter (1988); Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Strandley (1989); James Baldwin: The Legacy, ed. by Quincy Troupe (1989); James Baldwin: An Artist on Fire by W.J. Weatherby (1990); Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin by J. Campbell (1991); The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin by Jean-Francois Gounard (1993); Commitment As a Theme in African American Literature by R. Jothiprakash (1994); James Baldwin by Randall Kenan (1994); James Baldwin by Ted Gottfried (1997); Cliffsnotes Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain by Sherry Ann McNett (2000); Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen, ed. by D. Quentin Miller (2000); The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy by Katharine Lawrence Balfour (2001); Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson by Keith Clark (2002) - American writers in Paris in the 1950s: Richard Wright, Chester Himes - See also: Baldwin and Alex Haley Selected works:

GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, 1953 - Mene ja kerro se vuorille NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, 1955 GIOVANNI'S ROOM, 1956 - Huone Pariisissa NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, 1962 - Kukaan ei tiedä nimeäni ANOTHER COUNTRY, 1962 - Toinen maa THE FIRE NEXT TIME, 1963 - Ensi kerralla tulta BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE, (a play, produced in 1964) GOING TO MEET THE MAN, 1965 - Musta blues TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN'S BEEN GONE, 1968 - Sano minulle milloin juna lähti A RAP ON RACE, 1971 (with Margaret Mead) IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, 1974 - Jos tämä katu osaisi puhua THE DEVIL FINDS WORK, 1976 JUST ABOVE MY HEAD, 1979 THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN, 1985 THE PRICE OF THE TICKET: COLLECTED NON-FICTION 1948-1985, 1985 PERSPECTIVES: ANGLES ON AFRICAN ART, 1987 CONVERSATIONS WITH JAMES BALDWIN, 1989 EARLY NOVELS AND STORIES, 1998 COLLECTED ESSAYS, 1998 (ed. by Toni Morrison)