Letter to Jimmy
Page 3
From time to time Orilla Miller comes to your house with her sister, Henrietta Miller. She discovers your poverty, the daily burdens and exhaustion of Emma Berdis Jones, who works like a dog in the kitchen, or in the corner doing the washing with her bare hands. Orilla is moved, and brings clothing for the children. Your admiration is complete: “I loved her, [. . .] with a child’s love . . . It is certainly partly because of her, who arrived in my terrifying life so soon, that I never really managed to hate white people . . .”30
This woman, who died in 1991, remained close to you until the end of your life.
•••
During your secondary school education, two other defining moments arise. They are crucial in your training as a writer. Indeed, when you begin school at the Frederick Douglass junior high school in 1935, you are first captivated by Countee Cullen. He is one of the most influential poets of the Harlem Renaissance. In this school, he teaches French and is also involved in the English department, where another teacher, Herman W. Porter, notices you. The latter is a member of the editorial board of the school’s literary journal, Douglass Pilot. He has read your essays, praises your talents, and celebrates the refined writing style of a child who is barely thirteen years old. He suggests that you work on the journal, for which you soon become one of the editors-in-chief.
At this time you read and admire two writers. Aside from Charles Dickens, there is Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This woman of letters will be one of your primary focuses when you define your notion of literature in an article entitled, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” in which you will formulate your first “attacks” against your mentor, Richard Wright.
•••
Entering DeWitt Clinton High School represents a drastic change for you: this public school located in the Bronx enjoys an impressive reputation. To get there, you have to cross all of Harlem, and must therefore take the subway. Still, these commutes take you away for a short while from the confinement of the ghetto. In high school, you meet other adolescents who share your passion for writing. As in your last school, this one also publishes a journal: The Magpie. Very quickly you publish articles in it alongside other friends, such as Emile Capouya, Sol Stein and Richard Avedon.
Your former teacher, Countee Cullen, is delighted, and is all the more so when you ask to interview him for the columns of this literary journal, known for having discovered several young American authors. It is Emile Capouya, the son of Spanish immigrants, who introduces you to someone who will become one of your closest friends: the painter Beauford Delaney. He lives in Greenwich Village, the site par excellence of artistic culture and bohemian life, on Manhattan’s west side. This neighborhood is also known to be a bastion of another culture that defies convention. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, one of the oldest gay bookshops, for example, would be created here in Greenwich Village in 1967, while at the same time the neighborhood saw the birth of the famous disco group, the Village People. Through its spirit of difference, Greenwich Village becomes the symbol of sexual freedom, particularly for gay culture, starting with the riots that broke out after police attacks on homosexuals, transsexuals, and lesbians at the gay bar, Stonewall Inn, on June 28, 1969. Many use this date to mark the beginning of the struggle for gay rights.
And so, at your wit’s end from fighting with your father, you leave home at the age of seventeen—shortly after your break with the church—and you move to Greenwich Village.
•••
Meanwhile you continue to write more and more. You are sure that your moment has arrived, that it is time to cross the Rubicon. You have to publish in order to be known as an author. Publishers unfortunately reject all your works of fiction. You are not discouraged. As you wait, you decide to read, and to commit yourself to literary criticism. Several years later you collaborate with a photographer on a book about Harlem’s storefront churches. Although you receive a Rosenwald Fellowship, this work does not find a publisher, either. It is at this time that you begin to write book reviews, “. . . mostly, as it turned out, about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert. Did another book, in company with photographer Theodore Pelatowski, about the store-front churches in Harlem. This book met exactly the same fate as my first—fellowship, but no sale.”31
Greenwich Village is the site of a burgeoning African-American culture, for young people who want to change the world with their dreams. In this place, daily life resembles their destiny: unstable, wandering, but with no lack of projects. It is a community founded on team-work. Thanks to Delaney, you develop your artistic awareness, and your passion for music, above all for blues and jazz. Even though you have been imagining it for a while, it is Emile Capouya who convinces you to definitively abandon preaching. You are seventeen.
With only a high school diploma, it is not exactly as if your future is laid out before you. Your craft requires certain sacrifices with which you comply. You take on odd jobs in Greenwich Village until your father’s death. As destiny would have it, on the day of your father’s passing, on July 29, 1943, your sister Paula is born.
At the Calypso restaurant, where you work as a waiter, you see a lot of people come and go. Most of the biggest writers and artists of the day come to dine here. Your homosexuality is no longer a secret to anyone, and you even come out to your protector, Emile Capouya. During this time, you also begin writing what will become your first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and you meet your mentor, Richard Wright, to whom you will submit a number of pages from your manuscript, for the first time. You read everything you can get your hands on. You devour European literature; you are seduced by Balzac, James, Flaubert, and Dostoyevsky, among others . . .
1946 is made the darkest of years with the suicide of your friend Eugene Worth, to whom you never had the chance to reveal your feelings. This dramatic event affects you, and is one of the reasons that speed up your departure from your country.
•••
In 1948, at the age of twenty-four, you dream of leaving behind everything that is dear to you, of leaving America—your homeland—because, according to you, “it was necessary.” You want to follow the trail blazed before you by black American artists and writers no longer willing to endure the abuses inflicted upon them by a system of politically sanctioned racial segregation. These artists and writers had exported their cultural movement, the Harlem Renaissance, to Paris, finding in the French capital and “in the excitement of the cabarets what used to seduce them in Harlem: the vibrating pulse of new cultural blood.”32 The wave of these black migrants is impressive, and includes poets you frequent and novelists you admire, like William Du Bois and Langston Hughes, but also stars of the stage, among whom Josephine Baker is the most famous. France should, theoretically, allow you to escape from your demeaning status of Black American Man. However, you do not renounce your country: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”33
And so, some time later, while visiting the United States after an absence of several years, you are asked by the media about your adopted country. You make no concessions to her: you say you could just as easily live somewhere in Africa, Asia, or in the Third World. Later, you would, in fact, go on to live in Turkey and in Switzerland . . . But you have friends in France, even if this country, according to you, is a “hermetic” place, often marked by arrogance and “smugness” among its intellectuals and elite class. Still, you love France more than ever, and you certainly do not want to speak badly of a former lover, one who took you in her arms, opened her doors to you, and did not judge you on your physical appearance.34
•••
People would argue for a long time about the real reasons behind your “exile” in France. But the truth is that there is nothing more disheartening that the imprisonment of a creative person, nothing worse than the feeling that the world collapsing before you will swallow your
dreams in the end. In the 1940s, the dreams of African-Americans are targets of a hellish political beast in your homeland. Living in your country is no “picnic for black people.” The nearest tree could be your gallows without any form of trial, and meanwhile President Roosevelt faces opposition in Congress against passing anti-lynching laws. Overt segregation is commonplace in restaurants, schools, and in most public places. Your illustrious colleagues who preceded you in France emphasize their feelings of being writers in their own right, instead of being people entirely devoid of rights. In France, they are not considered black: they are artists, first and foremost, writers who capture the attention of the intellectual scene in their adopted country. Gone are the days of humiliation endured in their own country; the chance to create in peace, far from racial discrimination, is open to them.
Later you will admit that you wanted to live in a place where you could write without the feeling of being choked. France became the place where you blossomed, where you truly began to fight with the weapons at your disposal that no one could take away: words.35
3.
in the footsteps of Professor Wright
You arrive in Paris on November 11, 1948.
You live in small hotels, first in the rue du Dragon, then in the rue de Verneuil, not far from the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in rooms often rented to students, whose landlords must be indulgent at the end of the month when it comes time to collect the rent.
You pick up the Bohemian life you had been living in Greenwich village very easily. Reading Henry James enthralls you, while at the same time the people of Saint-Germain bore you. You prefer instead the common people you encounter in cafés, and the North Africans and black Africans with whom you discuss their situation. Nevertheless, as this is the fate of expatriates, you also dine in the homes of your—usually white—fellow countrymen. During this period, you meet Saul Bellow, among others.
Your quest for your own identity explains your participation in these gatherings. You are caught in the trap of frequently spending time with your white fellow Americans. If such a situation helps you to better understand yourself, outside of the issue of race, it cuts you off for some time from French society, whom you frequent very little—you do not yet speak French, which does not help you meet anyone. Meeting other Americans reveals a shocking reality to you: the white American is as lost as you are, and, throughout the course of your discussions, everyone avoids the problem at the core of American society—the question of race. It is far easier to evoke the beauty of the Champs-Elysées or of the Eiffel Tower . . .
Your mentor Richard Wright is already in Paris with his family. When you left New York, you had hidden the address of this venerable writer in your bag, as if it were a good-luck charm. Back home, he had always supported you, even helped you, in becoming an “honest man and a good writer.” And to some extent, even if you never clearly admitted this, it is because Wright is in the French capital that you feel comfortable with the idea of going there yourself.
People in the literary circle of black American exiles in Paris—a social circle Michel Fabre calls the “black bank”—know that a young author from Harlem is arriving. They had heard of him thanks to several articles published in various magazines and literary journals. Some had known him in Greenwich Village, while others were set to discover at last this “young, tense man, slight in stature, with extravagant hand gestures and a facial expression that could veer from tragic to comic . . .”36
This environment reminds you of the circumstances in which you met Richard Wright in New York, at the end of 1944. At this time, you are twenty years old. Wright, at thirty-six, is already famous thanks to his novels, especially Native Son. He is the first black American to have published a bestseller, and the tale that he narrates in his novel, about Bigger Thomas, a man of color who murders a rich white woman who is in love with him, incites a fury of protest. His comrades in the Communist Party in particular criticize him for portraying such a negative image of a black man. Be that as it may, Wright had achieved his goal: to expose the reality of American society, to express through Bigger Thomas’s character what you would later describe as “fury” and “hatred”, as a challenge to an America deaf to the demands of blacks.
Wright criticizes the American army head on, condemning their racism against blacks. He refuses to serve during the war because, as he underscores in a letter to one of his friends, “they ask us to die for a freedom that we have never known.” One of Wright’s biographers, Hazel Rowley, tells of how, in 1947, the writer distances himself from America, as do most of his black counterparts. Wright is encouraged by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and, in the end, settles in the City of Light with his wife—a Jewish American woman.37
It would be an understatement to say that your admiration for Wright’s journey knows no bounds. You have read and re-read Native Son to the point that is serves as inspiration for the title of your collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son. You dream of being like him because he had overcome the prevailing fatalism of his surroundings: “I had identified with him long before we met: [. . .] his example had helped me to survive. He was black, he was young, he had come out of the Mississippi nightmare and the Chicago slums, and he was a writer. He proved it could be done—proved it to me and gave me an arm against all those others who assured me it could not be done.”38
You want to meet him, talk with him; learn from your elder the meaning behind the effort, the discipline, and the demands of writing. And, while you are at it, how to achieve the same success.
Around this time, you knock on the door to his house in Brooklyn. The writer welcomes you with open arms, much to your great surprise, you who expected to find yourself face to face with an emotionally distant author, walled off by his fame. You are impressed, intimidated. He puts you at ease. And while you are enjoying some bourbon, you announce, in the euphoria of the conversation, that you have written fifty or sixty pages, a novel entitled In My Father’s House—which will become Go Tell It On the Mountain. You cannot gauge the level of excitement you have just stirred up in the mentor. He encourages you, and expresses a desire to read the pages that you had not brought with you. Do they exist, or had you made them up?
Leeming reports: “After a few days of furious writing, Baldwin sent the sixty pages to Brooklyn. Within a week Wright had read the manuscript, reacted positively to it, and, by way of Edward Aswell, his editor at Harper & Brothers, had recommended Baldwin for a Eugene F. Saxton Foundation Fellowship . . .”39
In 1945, you receive the fellowship of five hundred dollars in order to finish the book. It is a major step forward. And because the same prestigious Harper publishing house that publishes Wright supplies the funds, he speaks of you to his editor. A reading panel reviews your work. It is judged to be unpublishable, and, in the end, rejected both by that publisher and by Doubleday: “. . . when I was about twenty-one I had enough done of a novel to get a Saxton Fellowship. When I was twenty-two the fellowship was over, the novel turned out to be unsalable, and I started waiting on tables in a Village restaurant . . .”40
It is of course a painful disappointment, but you do not give up trying to emulate your mentor. You ask yourself what, in the end, makes Native Son have such a profound effect? Is it the shock of a white woman’s murder by a black man?
You begin writing a new work, Ignorant Armies, which, as in Wright’s book, tells a tale of murder with the issue of race at the heart of it: Wayne Lonergan, a bisexual, kills his rich wife for reasons related to their sexual problems. The voice of the narrative is unclear: although the story does gather its strength and truth from your life in Greenwich Village, marked by the “problem” of a sexuality that was more and more turned toward men, you speak in the place of your characters. What is more, this book contained two novels in one! The proof? Out of this “rough draft,” two of your most well-known works of fiction would emerge: Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, two novels that portray sexuality, even
homosexuality, in the most tragic light.41
Following in your mentor’s footsteps is not your only source of inspiration for the “failure,” Ignorant Armies. Your own existence prior to your arrival in France is its own series of tragedies. As James Campbell relates to us about your life: “His father, crippled with madness, had died in a psychiatric ward. Baldwin had lost his Christian faith, which had plunged him deep into crisis, and helped him, one could say, accept the awakenings of his homosexuality—something very little accepted in Harlem, where he lived, and accepted even less in Church, where he had been preaching as a young minister.”42
•••
In New York you continue all the while to have meetings with your mentor. He takes off for Paris in 1946.
France will be the stage for your confrontation. Wright is as yet unaware that the pupil who had knocked on his front door had grown up, and, to survive, would need to trace his own path. Everything can perhaps be summed up with terrifying clarity in the following words: “His work was a road-block in my road, the sphinx, really, whose riddles I had to answer before I could become myself. [. . .] Richard was hurt because I had not given him credit for any human feelings or failings. And indeed I had not, he had never really been a human being for me, he had been an idol. And idols are created in order to be destroyed.”43