James Baldwin

gigatos | June 8, 2022

Post Views: 20

Summary

James Arthur Baldwin († December 1, 1987 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Provence-Alpes-Côte d”Azur, France) was one of the most important U.S. writers of the 20th century, known far beyond the borders of the United States.

Many of his works deal with issues such as racism and sexuality. His narratives are famous for the personal style in which issues of black and gay identity and related social and psychological pressures are raised long before social, cultural or political equality was fought for these groups.

Also read, biographies – Hans Holbein the Younger

Youth and religion

James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924 under the name James Arthur Jones as the first child of the single mother Emma Berdis Jones; his father is unknown. After his mother”s marriage to factory worker and Baptist preacher David Baldwin, who had come to New York from New Orleans in the wake of the great migration, James was given his last name at the age of three. Emma and David Baldwin had eight children together in the following years.

James Baldwin”s youth in the ghetto was marked above all by the experience of poverty, deprivation and discrimination as well as by the religious fanaticism of the store-front church or Pentecostal and Holiness movement to which his family belonged. His father could hardly feed the large family and, as a fanatical lay preacher, sought consolation and compensation in his sense of being chosen and the promises of a better life in the hereafter, but was finally driven by the contradictions in his own existence into that delusion (“eaten up by paranoia”) which James Baldwin has since repeatedly portrayed as the inevitable consequence of racial hatred.

James had an extremely strained and severely disturbed relationship with his stepfather from his early youth. After a visionary revival experience as a fourteen-year-old, which subsequently also served as a model for the experiences of John Grimes of the same age in his strongly autobiographical debut novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin found recognition as a youthful preacher in his stepfather”s Pentecostal church from 1938 until he was seventeen. From then on, his relationship with his stepfather was marked by increasing rivalry and rejection by the latter. This rejection and David Baldwin”s moral religious fanaticism were later reflected as dominant themes in James Baldwin”s works.

Although James Baldwin initially found in a fanatical faith like his stepfather “the escape from his hatred for the white oppressors and his contempt for the oppressed blacks,” after three years of successful preaching he turned away from the church in 1941, which at the same time caused his final estrangement from his stepfather. Baldwin had become convinced that the ghetto churches were only a mask for “hatred, self-hatred and despair” and that religion in Harlem served exclusively the “imagination of revenge” (“a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge”).

From an early age, the gifted James showed a keen interest in literature. He was an avid reader as a child and teenager, finding his reading material in New York”s public libraries. Among the first literary influences on him were works by Harriet Beecher-Stowe, Horatio Alger, and Charles Dickens.

Also read, important-events – Russo-Turkish War (1806–1812)

Beginnings as a writer

Shortly after his renunciation of Christianity, James Baldwin successfully completed his school education in 1942 at De Witt Clinton High School, a primarily white school in the Bronx. There he had previously distinguished himself by publishing a school newspaper. He left the family and lived more poorly than well from various odd jobs in order to devote himself to writing.

In 1943, his stepfather died and Baldwin found himself responsible for supporting the family. However, he did not give up his decision to become a writer; on the contrary, he was encouraged by these works. He found a patron in the writer Richard Wright, 16 years his senior, whom he first met in 1944. Through Wright”s intercession, Baldwin received a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship for a novel project, but it fell through. Another book project, funded by a Rosenwald Fellowship, failed to find a publisher, as it had before.

In 1946 Baldwin published his first book review in The Nation newspaper. In the following years he became known as an essayist and reviewer; he published in well-known magazines and newspapers. His first significant work of fiction was the 1948 short story “Sonny”s Blues.”

In Baldwin”s relationship with his professed spiritual father Richard Wright, the conflict with his stepfather, which for Baldwin was still deep-seated, was subsequently repeated. A few years after the break with the store-front church and the religious world of his stepfather came the break with Wright, to whose Enlightenment impetus he owed the liberation from the fanatical religious constraints of his childhood. In one of his first essays Everybody”s Protest Novel (1949), Baldwin criticized Wright”s novel Native Son and accused it of Puritanism. This renewed inner conflict with his spiritual foster father and patron Wright subsequently became one of the major drives in Baldwin”s continuing literary output.

Baldwin in adopted country France

The initial unsuccessfulness of his first literary projects and the feeling of impossibility of finding himself and his place in a society that oppressed or ignored him pushed James Baldwin into exile in Paris in November 1948, following in Wright”s footsteps. As he later pointed out, he had been unable to endure the racism in New York. Unlike Wright, however, who moved in the circles of the French intellectual elite around Sartre, James Baldwin initially lived in Paris in a completely different milieu in abject poverty among Afro-French people, the unemployed, and the homeless. Influences of French existentialism are therefore not to be felt in his work.

Baldwin spent most of the next forty years of his life in his adopted home of France. Baldwin described this step as “self-exile. In the U.S., he said, he had not been allowed to develop in the direction in which he could only have developed: “All my countrymen had to offer me in those 24 years I tried to live in the country was death – a death, moreover, to their taste.”

In Europe, Baldwin, who until his death rejected all attempts by black Americans to derive the identity denied them from their African roots, realized that as an author he could only realize himself in the medium of Western culture and the English language. After a nervous breakdown, he stayed in the Swiss spa town of Leukerbad to recover as a stranger in the village, as his essay of the same name puts it.

Breakthrough and return to America

After his recovery, James Baldwin achieved his breakthrough as a writer in 1953 with the publication of his first novel Go tell it on the Mountain, which reflects his childhood and youth experiences in his native Baptist church. He also completed his second novel Giovanni”s Room in Europe, which caused a great stir and public discussion due to its subject matter.

In this novel, whose white protagonist also goes to France to find himself, Baldwin thematically, in shaping the hero”s search for identity in a homosexual relationship, also deals at a central literary point with the question of his own homosexuality, which is also expressed in his essay on André Gide and henceforth plays a weighty role in the majority of his works.

Wright and Baldwin”s friendship fractured when the former mentor, now also living in France, published Baldwin”s first lengthy manuscript and his in the Partisan Review

Four years after his return to the U.S. as an already recognized and celebrated author, Baldwin sharply distanced himself from his former mentor Wright in the three essays collected in “Alas, Poor Richard” in 1961 in his second anthology Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, thus attempting to free himself from the standards of the previous generation of African-American writers. In his literary stance, Baldwin thus came closer to the position of Ralph Ellison, who also rejected the postulate that African-American literature must necessarily be protest literature.

After Wright”s death in Paris, however, Baldwin”s later literary work underwent an astonishing reversal: without being accused of imitation, Baldwin was now able to express the new theme of protest that was also present and urgently sought after in his work. In the novel Another Country, which quickly became a bestseller and probably found a large circle of readers not least because of its numerous sex scenes, Baldwin, according to literary critics, did not sufficiently succeed in reconciling artistic distance (“artist”) with the expression of political protest (“propagandist”).

Also read, history – Münster rebellion

Involvement in the civil rights movement

Baldwin was active in the civil rights movement and especially against racism. His speeches and essays were highly influential, most notably his writing The Fire Next Time, in which, drawing on personal experience, he analyzed the racist structure and sexual double standards of U.S. society. Unlike other African-American writers of the 1950s and 1960s, Baldwin mostly maintained his optimism that ethnic conflicts in the United States could be overcome in the long term, albeit with great effort.

Also read, history – French Wars of Religion

Late life in France

After the fatal attacks on Malcolm X on February 21, 1965, and Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, Baldwin again found himself, as he had 20 years earlier, in a situation where he needed peace, time, and seclusion to reflect on the changed situation and to continue his literary activity. For this reason, he went into exile once again in France in 1970.

According to his own statements, in Hollywood, while trying to write a script for a film about Malcolm X, it had finally become clear to him that “dialogue was no longer possible and the American dream was over.” He now understood his new role, which he could claim, as that of a contemporary witness who presents the history of the Civil Rights Movement, as he himself experienced it, not as a documentary (“not a documentary”), but as a “personal book and testimony (or: testimony)” (“a personal book – a testimony”). With the metropolis of New York City, where many of his novels are set, he was bound by a grimly ambivalent relationship that could also be described as a love-hate relationship.

Baldwin”s late work reflects above all his efforts to create positive self-images under the impression of a “new black aesthetic,” in which, for example, his “exclusive interpretations of the black musical tradition, especially the gospel and the spiritual, as an expression of suffering and pain” stand. In his last novel, Just Above My Head (Engl.: Zum Greifen nah, 1981), Baldwin revisits his lifelong preoccupation with the African American church and music in a description of the life of a famous gospel singer.

James Baldwin died of esophageal cancer in 1987 at the age of 63 and was buried in Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale, New York on December 8, 1987.

After his death, Baldwin was temporarily forgotten, at least in the book market of the FRG. In the GDR, the publishing house Volk und Welt published his novel Eine andere Welt in four editions, one of them in 1988, a year after his death, in the ex libris series. In the context of the “Black Lives Matter” movement and racism debates, Baldwin was widely received worldwide in the 2010s and received new attention.

In spring 2018, dtv Verlagsgesellschaft launched the gradual edition of James Baldwin”s complete works in new translations by Miriam Mandelkow. The first volume to appear was the new translation of Baldwin”s debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, entitled Von dieser Welt, on February 28, 2018. This new translation was featured, among others, in the Literary Quartet (ZDF), in the Literaturclub (SRF

In Raoul Peck”s 2017 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, the unfinished manuscript Remember This House is the basis for Peck”s cinematic collage.

The eponymous film adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk by director Barry Jenkins had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2018 and was released in Germany in February 2019. Regina King won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Supporting Female for her role in the film.

A three-volume annotated edition of his works has been published by the Library of America:

As co-author

Baldwin was awarded a number of prizes for his work (National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, 1956 (George Polk Award). In 1986 he was made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. Since 1964 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Sources