Afterglow

Now in its 16th year, The Library of America series has produced 98 volumes of what constitutes the canon of American letters. James Baldwin is the fifth black writer to be accorded such status, the others having been W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Frederick Douglass and Zora Neale Hurston.

Among 20th century black writers, none was more influential and important than Wright, Ralph Ellison and Baldwin. Baldwin was unique, however, as one of the few American writers, white or black, who was also a celebrity, a status conferred by his being on the cover of Time magazine in 1963. He was a public intellectual before we had the phrase and, through the sheer power of his language, did almost as much as Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement to make the nation pay attention to its racial agony--at least for a brief moment.

Born James Arthur Jones in Harlem in 1924, he never knew his father and was renamed James Arthur Baldwin when his mother married in 1927 the Rev. David Baldwin, the harsh stepfather Baldwin portrayed in his first novel, “Go Tell It On the Mountain.” His writing life began in junior high school, where one of his teachers was Countee Cullen, the marvelous Harlem Renaissance poet. At 14, Baldwin underwent a religious conversion and was a Pentecostal minister throughout his high school years. He attended New York’s prestigious DeWitt Clinton High, where his classmates included writers Emile Capouya and Sol Stein and photographer Richard Avedon. He graduated in 1942 and, upon the death of his stepfather a year later, moved to Greenwich Village. He began writing reviews for liberal publications while working on a novel. Finally in late 1948, he moved to France, which would remain his primary residence until his death on Dec. 1, 1987.

His first novel, “Go Tell It On the Mountain,” was published to wide acclaim in 1953, and most critics still consider it his finest work of fiction. Reprinted in its entirety in the first volume here, it is the story of a Harlem family and how they seek to use religion to establish order amid the chaos created by racism and sexuality. Although Baldwin would later repudiate religion, his years as a boy minister gave him confidence in the power of language as an effective weapon in the battle to subdue chaos and establish order--without and within.

For American blacks in the decades before the civil rights movement of the ‘60s, the pervasiveness of racial discrimination and racism and the absence of avenues for redress made chaos the norm. This makes “Notes of a Native Son” (1955), Baldwin’s first collection of essays, all the more remarkable because of how he uses language to establish a bulwark of order against the chaos. He parts company with black writers of previous generations, and especially Wright, the master of protest literature, by not pleading with whites to acknowledge the humanity of his race. Then and now, Baldwin was an anomaly: a black man who pleaded for America. “Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his” (“Many Thousands Gone”).

Baldwin wrote as an American who shared in the dehumanization of blacks even as he suffered that dehumanization. There is no “us” and “them,” according to Baldwin. There is only we, us and our. His voice is unique in American literature because he articulated black anger in a way that allowed blacks and whites to affirm the justness of that anger. He accomplished this through the sheer eloquence of his language. Unlike Wright, Baldwin understood the aesthetic dimension of language, understood that language appeals to the ear as well as to the mind, and thus he muted his anger with music and seduced many into listening to melodies previously unheard. “. . . Since white men represent in the black man’s world so heavy a weight, white men have for black men a reality which is far from being reciprocal, and hence all black men have toward all white men an attitude which is designed, really, either to rob the white man of the jewel of his naivete, or else to make it cost him dear” (“Stranger in the Village”).

However, the chaos of racism was not the only maelstrom Baldwin had to confront. He was also homosexual, but one who never had to come out of the closet because he never went in. “Giovanni’s Room” (1956) was his second novel and the only one in which all the characters are white; it is the story of David, a white American in Paris caught between love for a young American woman and an Italian man, and a middle-aged homosexual French couple. One assumes the novel is included in this collection for its historical value, because as a novel it is a failure. The white American is an unsympathetic figure, and one never understands why anyone, male or female, would want to sleep with him. However, in 1956 a sympathetic novel about homosexuality and by a black writer on the rise was an event.

Philosophically, Baldwin’s views on sexual identity were consistent with his views on race. To judge others by anything other than their humanity was to create chaos. As Jacques, one of the middle-aged homosexuals, advises: “Love him, love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?”

“Giovanni’s Room” is a prelude to Baldwin’s most controversial, sexually graphic novel, “Another Country” (1962). Critics disparaged it while people bought enough copies to put it on the best-seller lists. Baldwin wanted Americans to experience what many feared most: interracial relationships and homosexual ones. The couplings cross almost all boundaries: black men-white women, white men-black women, black men-white men. For Baldwin, race and gender were artificial categories that did nothing except separate one from another, and the only bridge was the risk and terror of love. “[H]e was, briefly and horribly, in a region where there were no definitions of any kind, neither of color, nor of male and female. There were only the leap and the rending and the terror and the surrender.”

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The critical consensus is that except for the autobiographical first novel, Baldwin was a better essayist. Perhaps that depends on what one wants fiction to be. We live in an age in which novelists are praised for their attention to the jejune details in the lives of insipid people. Perhaps Baldwin was more comfortable in France and Europe, where there was a tradition of the novel as a vehicle for ideas and vision. His primary interest was not exploration of character but how history manifests itself in the struggles and conflicts of individuals. “Another Country” remains a brave, startling and far more exhilarating book than “Go Tell It On the Mountain.”

The other fiction included in the first volume here is the 1965 collection of short stories, “Going to Meet the Man.” The two opening stories, “The Rockpile” and “The Outing,” follow some of the characters from “Go Tell It On the Mountain.” However, the best stories are the much anthologized “Sonny’s Blues” and “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon.” Both demonstrate that Baldwin had an instinct for the form, and it is regrettable that he did not work more in it.

The most famous of his nonfiction books is “The Fire Next Time” (1963), two essays that made him an international celebrity. The civil rights movement reached its apex that year with the violent repression of demonstrations in Birmingham, Ala.; President Kennedy’s televised address to the nation about civil rights, the first by a president; and the March on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” oration. “The Fire Next Time” exposed the anger just beneath the surface in black America and sounded a warning about the bitter racial tensions and divisions America would face if it did not mend the historical wrongs of racism. “[T]he intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make . . . vengeance inevitable . . . historical vengeance, a cosmic vengeance, based on the law that we recognize when we say, ‘Whatever goes up must come down.’ ” This is his most eloquent book, distilling his extraordinary humanism and uncommon love, which he described “as a state of being, or a state of grace--not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the touch and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

With the possible exception of “Giovanni’s Room,” Toni Morrison has done a superb job of selecting Baldwin’s best, most important and influential work. Besides the two works of nonfiction already referred to, this volume includes the complete contents of “Nobody Knows My Name,” “No Name in the Street” and “The Devil Finds Work.” Those who have followed Baldwin’s career should note that what is collected in the second volume is almost identical to what was published in Baldwin’s “The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985.” However, The Library of America edition does include 11 previously uncollected essays along with 25 others from “The Price of the Ticket,” as well as a detailed chronology of Baldwin’s life and career.

Many maintain that with the publication of “The Fire Next Time,” Baldwin became a celebrity and spokesman and that his later work suffered. That is true, but Baldwin was never just a writer. He used his celebrated status to speak on behalf of those who did not have his gift for language nor access to audiences. And being a celebrity also filled a more personal need that he revealed when I interviewed him for the Sunday New York Times Book Review in the spring of 1984. I asked if “the celebrity James Baldwin” was anyone he knew. He answered, in part: “[T]he celebrity is not exactly Jimmy, though he comes out of Jimmy and Jimmy nourishes that, too. I can see now, with hindsight, that I would’ve had to become a celebrity in order to survive. A boy like me with all his handicaps, real and fancied, could not have survived in obscurity. I can say that it would have had to happen that way, though I could not see it coming.”

It is altogether possible that the black public intellectuals of our time are regarded seriously because James Baldwin had already pioneered the treacherous terrain of public life. The latter part of Baldwin’s career could be viewed as the triumph of a man who tried to accept the responsibility history had thrust on him, a responsibility he fulfilled with grace, charm, wit and, above all, integrity.

The publication of these two volumes makes it clear that Baldwin’s place in American letters is now secure. The uniqueness of his voice and the rightness of his vision come through clearly in his novels, stories and essays. It is a voice and vision that is needed now more than it was 30 years ago.