James Baldwin: A Biography

by David A. Leeming

Illegitimacy and an almost obsessive preoccupation with his stepfather were constant themes in the life and works of James Baldwin.

In time Baldwin was to understand that his “ugliness” was his stepfather’s problem, that his stepfather’s “intolerable bitterness of spirit” was the result of his frustrations, that his need to humiliate those closest to him was, in fact, a reflection of the hatred David Baldwin felt towards himself as a black man: “It had something to do with his blackness, I think—he was very black—with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful.” And “he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.”

Suicide was a subject that obsessed him throughout his life. He lost several close friends by that route and attempted it himself at least four times.

Furthermore, he began to sense that the passion that overcame him in the church services was merely a mask for his own repressed sexuality, that he was not really escaping from anything. The love he gave his congregation—the love that attracted them—in his sermons and his visitations to the sick was based firmly in his own anguish.

Jimmy had burst into tears and revealed that he was illegitimate. He had learned this “terrible truth” about himself in a conversation between his parents. What he overheard he had vaguely suspected; it explained much of Mr. Baldwin’s attitude towards him. His “father’s” house was not his house. “Set thy house in order” was a call to the prophet within young James and the essence of the message he would soon carry as the “bastard of the West” into the house that was Western civilization at large, the house that had dispossessed him even as it had dispossessed his ancestors.

The wider possibilities of the arts and the flesh had won out over the narrowness of the church.

“Look,” he said. Jimmy’s eyes had already followed Beauford’s anyway, but he just saw water. “Look again,” Beauford said. Then he noticed the oil on the surface of the water and the way it transformed the buildings it reflected. It was a lesson in complex vision that would remain with James Baldwin the writer.

It was not only a question of careful observation, he said; it had to do with a willingness to face ugliness in order to find what the artist has to find.

“It was only that I had hated him and I wanted to hold on to this hatred…. I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”

Emotionally deadened by the incident, he returned to the Grand Hôtel du Bac, where the landlady greeted him with an ultimatum—the money for his bill in an hour or he was to leave. In his room he tied one of the original dirty sheets to a water pipe, stood on a chair, tied the loose end of the sheet around his neck, and jumped. The only thing that gave way was the water pipe. The hanging had been a desperate act of solidarity with all of those literally and metaphorically imprisoned “blacks” of all races who must bear the agony of not being recognized as human beings. By means of it, the tension and the depression were broken. Rebaptized by the flood of water from the broken pipe, he found himself overcome by a kind of laughter that was more powerful than the laughter in the court.

Portrait is the metaphorical record of Joyce’s coming to grips with the threefold threat to his art of family, nation, and religion even as it is also the record of his recognition that family, nation, and religion were necessarily the basis of his art. Precisely the same can be said of Baldwin’s relationship to Mountain.

He was born, he said, to translate the painful human experience into art.

Love is at the heart of the Baldwin philosophy. Love for Baldwin cannot be safe; it involves the risk of commitment, the risk of removing the masks and taboos placed on us by society. The philosophy applies to individual relationships as well as to more general ones. It encompasses sexuality as well as politics, economics, and race relations. And it emphasizes the dire consequences, for individuals and racial groups, of the refusal of love. Giovanni’s Room takes up this question.

The ability to touch and to love will be the black American weapon against white American self-denial in the novels that follow Giovanni’s Room. David is representative of the outlook and the failure of white America, and Giovanni is just as clearly the embodiment of what Baldwin sees as the outlook of the black man.

the meeting was not a success; it crystallized a problem that was basic to the civil rights movement of the sixties. The white liberals, represented by Kennedy and Marshall, were still pledged to reform the existing system. The blacks at the meeting saw the race problem as having moral dimensions that transcended the particular concerns of the day and went to the heart of what it was to be American.

Baldwin, like many other black intellectuals, was frustrated with the civil rights movement itself. Something new was needed, something that would speak to the disillusionment he and others felt about the commitment of white liberals and of blacks who allowed themselves to be dominated by whites in the movement.

Beginning with his 1961 visit, Baldwin spent some eight years off and on in Istanbul. A local reporter once asked him what attracted him to Turkey, and his response was essentially the same one he gave everyone who asked him that question. He was in Istanbul because he was “left alone” and could work better there.

The 1965 Watts events—and surely Baldwin would have said the same about the 1992 events in Los Angeles—were not “riots” but an insurrection against racism. To say mere “hoodlums” and “thugs” rioted was to accept a racist version of events and to evade the harsh truths behind them.