James Baldwin in October 1963. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Where to start with: James Baldwin
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The great American author and civil rights activist’s works offered prophetic warnings, generosity of spirit and clarity like no other when it came to race relations
Tom Jenks
Friday 2 August 2024
2 August 2024 marks the centenary of James Baldwin’s birth, a good time for a renewed appreciation and celebration of this great American author and civil rights activist. From his early teenage years as a Pentecostal preacher, he possessed precocious oratorical skills that powerfully moved an audience in call and response, and when as a young man he left the pulpit, he carried his gifts with him, believing that religion would not suffice to create the needed change in race relations, but that his writing could.
Sexual healing: James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room voted best erotic passage
Author beats contenders including Jeanette Winterton, DH Lawrence and Philip Roth in the Literary Hub’s contest to find the best sex writing
Alison Flood Friday 8 April 2016 13.59 BST
A passage from James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room has won a tournament of literary sex writing launched by the Literary Hub to reward the best erotic passages from literature.
In stark contrast to the Bad Sex in Fiction prize run by the Literary Review, which seeks to single out “poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description”, the Lit Hub site set out to find the best sex writing in literature. Judges including the writers Roxane Gay, Candace Bushnell and John Ashbery considered passages drawn from the past 200 years, with an extract from Baldwin’s novel emerging triumphant on Friday morning over fellow finalist Jeanette Winterson.
Giovanni’s Room tells of David, a young American in Paris, who has just proposed to his girlfriend but is drawn to bartender Giovanni while she is away on a trip. The winning extract deals with narrator David’s early homosexual encounter with his friend Joey.
Baldwin writes: “Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other ...
To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it. I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.
Winterson’s contender, from Written on the Body, describes how “she smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was a child. She keeps a starfish in there. I crouch down to taste the salt, to run my fingers around the rim. She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She’s refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.”
The judges said Baldwin’s passage was “almost unanimously” chosen as the overall winner.
“There is a good reason most awards given for sex writing are for bad sex writing: to commit to words that most intimate and personal act is generally a doomed undertaking. For even our best writers, to describe sex is to veer between the biological and the euphemistic, the soft-focus and the fluorescent. It rarely works. And yet many have tried, and will continue to do so,” said LitHub, announcing the contest last week.
The competition is designed as a tournament, with writing divided into four groups: everything prior to the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, then writing between 1922 and 1955 when Lolita was published, then 1955 until the 1980s, and then from the 1980s until the present.
These divides were chosen for the first round “in the interest of fairness, variety, and to reflect the literary canon without being entirely dead, white, male, straight”, according to LitHub editor, Jonny Diamond. This was as well as marking “shifts in mores as reflected in literary scandals. The first era was pre-1922 Ulysses, followed by Lolita in 1955 … We did this to avoid Kathy Acker being compared to Flaubert. After the first round, we opened up the competition regardless of era.”
The passages selected, said Diamond, were intended to be “the more iconic examples”. “For example, we went with a selection from Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, even though there are probably better sex passages in Roth’s oeuvre. People have complained about this, but that was inevitable, no matter what.”
The initial “Sexy Sixteen” contenders, which LitHub said was selected from “many, many worthy candidates”, featured authors including Henry Miller, Annie Proulx, Erica Jong, Kate Chopin and Zora Neale Hurston. This list was narrowed down to “The Erotic Eight” and “The Final Four of F*cking”.
Baldwin’s entry beat Jong in the first round, Bram Stoker in the second and an extract from DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which “all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring, like a sea anemone under the tide, clamouring for him to come in again and make fulfilment for her”, in the third round.
The poet and judge John Ashbery said the Lawrence passage was “ridden with embarrassing clichés”, but that Baldwin writes of “just things as they happen”, ‘another person’s body, […] another person’s smell’. In other words, chances are this really happened.”
Diamond said that the tournament coincides with the American college basketball tournament, known as March Madness, a single elimination tournament comprised of one massive bracket. “We were talking about doing something fun in that format, from a literary perspective, and literary sex writing just seemed the obvious choice. It’s easy to find bad examples, and very hard to find good— considering this is pretty much a basic and universal experience, we thought we’d try to figure out who’s done it well.”
In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country, Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?”
“Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.”
“People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.”
“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
“The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, [yet] at the same time, he needs no one at all.”
“When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.”
I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church—in fact, of our church—and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous. The word “safety” brings us to the real meaning of the word “religious” as we use it. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without. What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen; nothing had changed. But now, without any warning, the whores and pimps and racketeers on the Avenue had become a personal menace. It had not before occurred to me that I could become one of them, but now I realized that we had been produced by the same circumstances. Many of my comrades were clearly headed for the Avenue, and my father said that I was headed that way, too. My friends began to drink and smoke, and embarked—at first avid, then groaning—on their sexual careers. 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. Like the strangers on the Avenue, they became, in the twinkling of an eye, unutterably different and fantastically present. Owing to the way I had been raised, the abrupt discomfort that all this aroused in me and the fact that I had no idea what my voice or my mind or my body was likely to do next caused me to consider myself one of the most depraved people on earth. Matters were not helped by the fact that these holy girls seemed rather to enjoy my terrified lapses, our grim, guilty, tormented experiments, which were at once as chill and joyless as the Russian steppes and hotter, by far, than all the fires of Hell.
Café de Flore, where Baldwin worked on his novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”Agnes Dherbeys for The New York Times
One bright afternoon in Paris, on the terrace of the cafe Deux Magots, in St.-Germain-des-Prés, I found myself engaged in an increasingly animated conversation about the writer James Baldwin and the notorious feud that broke out between him and his fellow African-American expatriate Richard Wright.
Oil on Canvas, 24/01/2019 – Black Activist James Baldwin
About these Nina Simone & James Baldwin Oil Paintings
I chose to paint Baldwin with a mellow yellow compared to Simone, who has a reddish undertone to it because of the energy that she gives off in her performances.
Their faces which can’t be contained by the canvas, a zoom-in. I like to dig a bit deeper into why they do or say what they did, I check out the biographies and interviews behind their work. There’s a reason why they’re so well loved and known!
Their eyes are the obvious focus, they’ve always drawn me in, so I’ve exaggerated them.
The Doom and Glory of Knowing Who You Are: James Baldwin on the Empathic Rewards of Reading and What It Means to Be an Artist
“An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven,”James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) wrote in his classic 1962 essay “The Creative Process.” By then, he was already one of America’s most celebrated writers — an artist who shook up the baseboards of society by dismantling the structures of power and convention with unflinching fortitude, dignity, and integrity of conviction.
On May 17, 1963, Baldwin appeared on the cover of TIME magazine as part of a major story titled “Nation: The Root of the Negro Problem,” whose lead sentence read: “At the root of the Negro problem is the necessity of the white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to live with himself.” Although Baldwin’s civil rights advocacy was the focus, the piece shone a sidewise gleam on Baldwin the artist and raised the broader question of the writer’s role in society.
Giovanni’s Room shows the fearful side of dauntless James Baldwin
A love story ever on the brink of ‘self-contempt’, the novel shows the private terrors that beset the fearless public campaigner
Sam Jordison Tue 19 Feb 2019
A mind in turmoil … James Baldwin in New York in 1963.
Photograph: Dave Pickoff/AP
Today James Baldwin is most frequently encountered as a “trailblazer of the civil rights movement”; a magnificent prophet who declared that “ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have”.
His contemporary relevance is so obvious it hardly needs to be stated – although it’s always good to be reminded. To watch him in the recent documentary I Am Not Your Negro is exhilarating, showing just what an unstoppable moral and intellectual force he was. It’s not just that it’s hard to disagree with him; it’s impossible to argue with him. Representatives of the old order charge towards his machine-gun rhetoric like sword-waving cavalrymen and they are mown down.
He was politely devastating when Professor Paul Weiss tried to tell him on the Dick Cavett TV chatshow that he shouldn’t be so concerned about “colour”, when his life has been threatened, and his friends have been killed, precisely because of colour. Meanwhile, the footage of Baldwin shredding the rightwing commentator William F Buckley at the Cambridge Union is one of the most impressive rhetorical performances of the modern age. “It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one ninth of its population is beneath them,” he said toward the end of his speech. “Until the moment comes when we, the Americans, are able to accept the fact that my ancestors are both black and white, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country – until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the American dream.” At his conclusion, the room erupted in a standing ovation. Baldwin’s words were forged in injustice and tragedy, making his delivery all the more remarkable. It feels impossible to imagine anyone who could ever take him on.
But there was one person capable of defeating James Baldwin – and that was James Baldwin. In Giovanni’s Room, he goes to war with himself and loses.
On the one hand, the novel feels as if it is striving to be a regular love story, describing something natural and joyous. Two young and beautiful people meet in a bar in Paris. There is an immediate spark. “We connected the instant that we met,” says the narrator. They enjoy talking together and the narrator feels “shy”. They flirt. They drink. They stay up too late and walk across the Seine in the early morning, have breakfast, make love, move in together. There is tenderness and affection. They make each other laugh. One of them declares, “I have only just found out that I want to live.”
But there are obstacles. Because the two lovers are both men and “people have dirty words for – for this situation”. David, the narrator, begins to feel his life is “occurring beneath the sea”. His love is “a cavern in which I would be tortured until madness came, in which I would lose my manhood”. The thing that brings him joy also brings him terror and mortification. “I was ashamed,” he says of his first same sex encounter. “The very bed in its sweet disorder, testified to vileness.”
David also regards most other gay men with horror, comparing a boy who goes out at night in makeup and earrings to “monkeys eating their own excrement” and bitterly scorns older men he sees chasing youth. This is contempt is made worse still because it is also “self-contempt”.
This blend of beauty and disgust makes for a destabilising reading experience. Everything up and down. One minute we’ll be appreciating the beauty of Parisian rooftops, “their myriad stacks very beautiful and vari-coloured under the pearly sky”; the next, we’re down on pavements “slick with leavings, mainly cast off rotten leaves, flowers, fruit and vegetables which had met with disaster natural and slow, or abrupt”.
We are witnessing a mind in turmoil, tangled and contradictory. This novel is unquestionably powerful and sad. But it can also feel tortured. David should not be mistaken for Baldwin, but it’s hard to separate the author entirely from his pain and moral uncertainty. After all, he chose Walt Whitman for the epigraph: “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.”
But that’s not to say that this doubting 1956 novel should be completely separated from the rhetorician, who spoke with such clarity and assurance at the Cambridge Union in 1965. Because there, Baldwin spoke as a man who knew what it was to be hesitant, vulnerable and defeated – and was all the more effective as a result. He contained multitudes.
From Kazuo Ishiguro’s laconic intimations to Mark Twain’s garrulous energy, these are masterclasses in the difficult art of beginning
Catherine Lacey
S
ometimes I want an opening to slap me in the face; other times I’d rather it come on like a creepy hand across my shoulder. There are millions of ways a voice can convince me to listen, but there are even more ways it can fail. I have little patience for the latter. Life is not long enough to ingest sub-par art.
It all gets so much more fraught when I’m the writer, not the reader, of that opening scene. I worked and reworked, un-worked and reworked the first chapter of my second novel, The Answers, trying to get the tone just right. It began as 12 pages, a braid of the main character’s memories and anxieties, then whittled down to 10, then eight, then five. For a year, I thought that five-page opening was perfect. Then, in a rare late-night revision fit, I deleted it and replaced the whole thing with a single paragraph. Now it wastes no time in opening the book with the right feeling –a mix of regret and menace and mystery.
Here are 10 openings that satisfied me enough to be memorable. As usual, the list is unranked and inherently incomplete.
“Nikki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation; it was a compromise I reached with her father. For paradoxically it was he who wanted to give her a Japanese name and I – perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past – insisted on an English one.”
I was first compelled by the nervous, halting voice, but in only two sentences the narrator has hinted at tensions between past and present, mother and father, England and Japan.
“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. Not until the morning of his 14th birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.”
The language here is so deliciously clear, yet the content is about how brutal and controlling an inherited story can be, how the repeated words of others can predetermine the life of another. Few writers have elucidated this human predicament as well as Baldwin.
“Her first name was India – she was never able to get used to it. It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter? As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did.”
The utter exasperation and estrangement. Enough said.
“The disease has been in remission for seven years. Now I can try to remember what happened. Not understand. Just remember.
“For seven years I tried not to remember too much because there was too much to remember, and I didn’t want to fall any further behind with the events of my life. I still don’t have a vegetable garden. I still haven’t been to France. I have gone to bed with enough people that they seem like actual people now, but while I was going to bed with them I thought I was catching up. I am sorry. I had lost what seemed like a lot of time.”
Manguso makes memoir seem easy, but do not be fooled. Her works are often short and spare because she knows how to discern what is unnecessary from what is vital.
“One way of looking at it is that it was just an unfortunate by-product of Hurricane Edna.”
Perhaps my years in New Orleans predispose me to want to know every unfortunate by-product of a hurricane, but I can assure you that what the narrator is referring to here is much stranger than anything you could easily imagine. Lightning Rodsis one of the most marvellous books about subterranean sexual forces in the modern era.
“‘Quite like old times,’ the room says. ‘Yes? No?’
“There are two beds, a big one for madame and a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur. The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint, almost imperceptible. The street outside is narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and ending in a flight of steps. What they call an impasse.”
I am not often a fan of overt scene-setting as a first paragraph, but here Rhys uses it to slyly convey a sense of ruin and disappointment. That last sentence always makes me smile darkly.
“Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.
“A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Every thing in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their loads of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.”
I’m sure I don’t need to convince you to read Dickens, but has there ever been a description of a place more bizarre and clear at once? He manages to be hilarious and lucid, loose and exacting – all these things in a simple description of a place. Not a cliche in sight.
“Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliche and, presumably, creating a genre. There was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I find, are the ones learned in your sleep. Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love – you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you’re over.”
This one breaks a lot of rules you would be taught in a creative writing class, but it has enough mystery and momentum that I don’t care. Every time I read something by Adler, I go immediately into that trance that is the closest thing to being another person I can imagine.
“We are on our way to Budapest. Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me. We are going even though we are not allowed to cross Mizilikazi Road, even though Bastard is supposed to be watching his sister Fraction, even though Mother would kill me dead if she found out; we are just going.”
All I thought when I read this was, I’m going too.
“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing.”
It’s all about the voice and playfulness and warmth here. It’s another example of how Twain could transfer the sound of a story well-told to the page, giving it nuance and depth without losing any colloquial heat.
The Answers by Catherine Lacey is published by Granta.
