I truly discovered James Baldwin earlier this year. I say truly because while I’m certain I had heard his name many times before, I couldn’t quite place him as a historical or literary reference, and I think the reason for this simply lied in that I really wasn’t that much interested in who he was. At least, not in the same way Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr interested me.
It wasn’t until coming across an impressive video documentary titled I Am Not Your Negro, based on an unfinished work by Baldwin that my radar picked up the signal and I decided to have a firsthand view of the author. Perhaps I’ll write about I Am Not Your Negro at some other time. Suffice it to say that it is both a visual and narrative masterpiece to be enjoyed more than a few times as I already have.
James Baldwin was a relevant figure in his time and is probably more so nowadays almost thirty years after his death. He was a top rate intellectual and literary critic, besides being a writer. While he was friends with the leading figures of the Civil Rights Movement in the 50’s and 60’s, he underwent a self-imposed exile in Paris that accounted for his being not as visible in the American mind at the time. However, anybody who was somebody then knew of him and knew of his piercing critique as a leading Black writer regarding not just academic or literary matters, but sociological issues, first and foremost the fight for desegregation and civil rights in the South.
As an incredibly piercing writer, Baldwin gave us some of the boldest social commentary on race issues and the many faces of racism in the history of the United States. One of his books, a collection of essays written from 1954 to 1960 while in Europe and titled Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, gives us a peak at the heart of a writer continuing to seek freedom from “the Negro Problem” he knew all too well he couldn’t escape. That gradual and cold realization sparks the process that will return him from his European haven to America.
In the introduction to Nobody Knows My Name he writes,
What it came to for me was that I no longer needed to fear leaving Europe, no longer needed to hide myself from the big and dangerous winds of the world. The world was enormous and I could go anywhere in it I chose―including America: and I decided to return here because I was afraid to. But the question which confronted me, nibbled at me, in my stony Corsican exile was: Am I afraid of returning to America? Or am I afraid of journeying any further with myself? Once this question had presented itself it would not be appeased, it had to be answered. (p. xiii)
I stumbled, if you will, upon Nobody Knows My Name recently while at the local public library. I was scanning titles at the new arrivals section when I saw the title Nobody Knows My Name on the spine of a book and the name Baldwin below it. Having seen the video documentary, the connection was instant. I pulled the book and, lucky me, it was indeed authored by James Baldwin. I read part of the intro and the writing pulled me in, but I returned the book to its shelf. I think it was on the new arrivals shelves because it was a new acquisition by the library, not because it was a new publication. Baldwin died in 1987. I came back a few days later knowing I was to read it, so I checked it out of the library and dug in.
James Baldwin wrote as an uncompromising thinker. His time in Europe helped him solidify his identity as a writer because it afforded him freedom from the great social pressures that sought to stifle him not merely as a writer but, above all else, as a man in his home country. Nobody Knows My Name lets us in on the writer as a free agent in the pursuit of truth,
But I still believe that the unexamined life is not worth living: and I know that self-delusion, in the service of no matter what small or lofty cause, is a price no writer can afford. His subject is himself and the world and it requires every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are. (p. xii)
One of the features that distinguishes the essays in Nobody Knows My Name is that beside its social commentary and literary criticism, Baldwin employs the memoir in the service of his narrative. And this is perhaps the most refreshing element―for literary critics can be dry as hell sometimes―in the book. Baldwin obviously has an impressive command of the written word. His type of writing is so incisive and clear one cannot avoid trying to engage at the same deep level he challenges us to engage him with.
I’m not a fast reader and NKMN isn’t a particularly long book, but I went through its pages like a man on a mission. It’s not just that Baldwin commands the written word, he is aware of his audience and respects it so much that there is no place to beat around the bushes. At the same time, he doesn’t want to be a stumbling block in the minds or hearts of his readers. He simply strikes a chord with them, challenges, even shocks them, and by resorting to the memoir becomes accessible and appeals to the hearts and minds of his readers equally.
One is hard pressed to choose a favorite among the essays in Nobody Knows My Name, but I’ll say a line or two about my favorite three in the book.
The Discovery of What it Means to Be an American is my first favorite essay where Baldwin has an honest confrontation with himself as he comes to terms with being an American writer, particularly a writer in Europe—in self-imposed exile.
This is a personal day, a terrible day, the day to which his entire sojourn has been tending. It is the day he realizes that there are no untroubled countries in this fearfully troubled world; that if he has been preparing himself for anything in Europe, he has been preparing himself—for America. In short, the freedom that the American writer finds in Europe brings him, full circle, back to himself, with the responsibility for his development where it always was: in his own hands.
Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him—he may be forced to—but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends. (pp. 9-10)
My second favorite essay—and my order here does not imply importance—is Faulkner and Desegregation. I may have read a short story or two from William Faulkner back in my college days so at least I know enough to say that he is one of the towering figures in American literature. And by reading this essay I also learned that Faulkner came from a very well to do, slave-owning Mississippian stock. The irony here is that Faulkner was apparently against segregation in the South. But Baldwin sees through the southerner’s thin veil of moral indignation against it and calls him on the floor for what he really is—a hypocrite who when push comes to shove is reluctant to forgo his very deeply rooted, very southern sensibilities preferring to remain in favor of the status quo he himself inherited. Baldwin cuts to the chase right off the bat in his essay addressing what happens when a man encounters the important crossroads life will bring him to,
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set free—he has set himself free—for higher dreams, for greater privileges. All men have gone through this, go through it, each according to his degree, throughout their lives. It is one of the irreducible facts of life. (p. 117)
Surely, Faulkner read these words and knew what Baldwin was talking about, but he simply was not willing to put his money where his mouth was. After all, he’s the one who said, The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.
The third essay that got my attention was The Male Prison, a piercing yet compassionate critique of French author André Gide’s Madeleine, an autobiographical confessional of the writer’s marriage. It was no taboo then, and much less now, that literary circles contained its share of homosexuals, male and female. This essay was originally published under the title Gide as Husband and Homosexual in December 1954.
During Gide’s time, tradition dictated that men and women subscribe to the convention of marriage between husband and wife, male and female. Having been reared in an austere Protestant (Huguenot) family with strong Catholic leanings (!), Gide followed the established societal norms only to fight against them as he grew into his vocation as a writer. This fight to find his own voice both as a writer and a man took him into the depths of homosexual relationships, while still remaining married to his “beloved” Madeleine.
Given the visceral emotions Madeleine elicits, Baldwin engages Gide and the role of homosexuality in his relationship to his wife on the same plane. Yes, he is honest, but Baldwin doesn’t betray honesty in such a way that it detracts from his appreciation of Madeleine as a literary critic. It is obvious for him that a Protestant ethos permeates Gide’s work and at the same time the French writer exhibits his homosexuality like a badge of honor. Baldwin doesn’t judge Gide for his homosexuality, but had Gide been less explicit about it, it could have served him (and his readers) better. For Baldwin, the question of homosexuality, moreover whether it is natural or not, is not the main concern in appreciating Gide’s Madeleine. Ultimately, it was an unshakable guilt that stood between him and Madeleine like a chasm and in spite of his love for her he paid a steep price because he could not reconcile his morality as a Protestant man and his morality as a homosexual man. Baldwin gets at the bottom of Gide’s crisis when he states that,
The great problem [for Gide] is how to be—in the best sense of that kaleodoscopic word—a man.
This problem was at the heart of all Gide’s anguish, and it proved itself, like most real problems, to be insoluble. He died, as it were, with the teeth of this problem still buried in this throat. What one learns from Madeleine is what it cost him, in terms of unceasing agony, to live with this problem at all. (p. 157-158)
So Gide spiritualizes his relationship to Madeleine since a natural—carnal—desire for her is not an option. This according to Baldwin is a major failure of Gide, who doesn’t seem to understand that he had actually married a woman. Gide was the quintessential egotistical man who was not able to even scratch the surface of a woman’s nature much less her needs. He was in a conundrum he couldn’t escape. Baldwin illuminates this in the following way,
Gide’s dilemma, his wrestling, his peculiar, notable and extremely valuable failure testify—which should not seem odd—to a powerful masculinity and also to the fact that he found no way to escape the prison of that masculinity. And the fact that he endured this prison with such dignity is precisely what ought to humble us all, living as we do in a time and country where communion between the sexes has become so sorely threatened that we depend more and more on the strident exploitation of externals, as, for example, the breasts of Hollywood glamour girls and the mindless grunting and swaggering of Hollywood he-men. (pp. 161-162)
