Baldwin
Early Novels and Stories
By James A. Baldwin
Library of America
Copyright © 1998
James A. Baldwin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1883011515
CHAPTER ONE
Autobiographical Notes
I was born in Harlem thirty-one years ago. I began plotting novels at
about the time I learned to read. The story of my childhood is the
usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained
observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. In
those days my mother was given to the exasperating and
mysterious habit of having babies. As they were born, I took them
over with one hand and held a book with the other. The children
probably suffered, though they have since been kind enough to
deny it, and in this way I read Uncle Tom's Cabin and A Tale of
Two Cities over and over and over again; in this way, in fact, I
read just about everything I could get my hands on--except the
Bible, probably because it was the only book I was encouraged to
read. I must also confess that I wrote--a great deal--and my first
professional triumph, in any case, the first effort of mine to be
seen in print, occurred at the age of twelve or thereabouts, when a
short story I had written about the Spanish revolution won some
sort of prize in an extremely short-lived church newspaper. I
remember the story was censored by the lady editor, though I
don't remember why, and I was outraged.
Also wrote plays, and songs, for one of which I received a letter
of congratulations from Mayor La Guardia, and poetry, about
which the less said, the better. My mother was delighted by all
these goings-on, but my father wasn't; he wanted me to be a
preacher. When I was fourteen I became a preacher, and when I
was seventeen I stopped. Very shortly thereafter I left home. For
God knows how long I struggled with the world of commerce and
industry--I guess they would say they struggled with me--and
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 and writing 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. (It
was a Rosenwald Fellowship.) By the time I was twenty-four I had
decided to stop reviewing books about the Negro problem--which,
by this time, was only slightly less horrible in print than it
was in life--and I packed my bags and went to France, where I
finished, God knows how, Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was
born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of
his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On
the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent
with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to
make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over
even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds
that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him
cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a
certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his
help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the
next--one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the
next. When one begins looking for influences one finds them by
the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough
anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the
store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually
understated in Negro speech--and something of Dickens' love for
bravura--have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake
my life on it. Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many
ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most
rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a
Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with
this reality. (Truce, by the way, is the best one can hope for.)
One of the difficulties about being a Negro writer (and this is
not special pleading, since I don't mean to suggest that he has it
worse than anybody else) is that the Negro problem is written
about so widely. The bookshelves groan under the weight of
information, and everyone therefore considers himself informed.
And this information, furthermore, operates usually (generally,
popularly) to reinforce traditional attitudes.
Of traditional attitudes there are only two--For or Against--and I,
personally, find it difficult to say which attitude has caused me
the most pain. I am speaking as a writer; from a social point of
view I am perfectly aware that the change from ill-will to good-will,
however motivated, however imperfect, however expressed, is
better than no change at all.
But it is part of the business of the writer--as I see it--to examine
attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source. From this
point of view the Negro problem is nearly inaccessible. It is not
only written about so widely; it is written about so badly. It is
quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming
articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate
about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and
my profit on't is I know how to curse.") Consider: the tremendous
social activity that this problem generates imposes on whites and
Negroes alike the necessity of looking forward, of working to
bring about a better day. This is fine, it keeps the waters troubled;
it is all, indeed, that has made possible the Negro's progress.
Nevertheless, social affairs are not generally speaking the writer's
prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely
necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a
distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can
look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to
take a long look back. In the context of the Negro problem neither
whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the
faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that
makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain
horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own
development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a
kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I
did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in
some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to
Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the
cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special
attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain
my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any
reflection of myself. I was an interloper;
this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage
which I could possibly hope to use--I had certainly been unfitted
for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate these white
centuries, I would have to make them mine--I would have to accept
my special attitude, my special place in this scheme--otherwise I
would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult
was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always
hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide
from himself as the price of his public progress; that I hated and
feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people;
on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to
produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world. And
this meant, not only that I thus gave the world an altogether
murderous power over me, but also that in such a self-destroying
limbo I could never hope to write.
One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience.
Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this
experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This
is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder
of life that order which is art. The difficulty then, for me, of being a
Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from
examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous
demands and the very real dangers of my social situation.
I don't think the dilemma outlined above is uncommon. I do
think, since writers work in the disastrously explicit medium of
language, that it goes a little way towards explaining why, out of
the enormous resources of Negro speech and life, and despite the
example of Negro music, prose written by Negroes has been
generally speaking so pallid and so harsh. I have not written about
being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only
subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I
could hope to write about anything else. I don't think that the
Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently
without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history,
traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of
the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the
contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America
bears some responsibility for it. I believe this the more firmly
because it is the overwhelming tendency to speak of this problem
as though it were a thing apart. But in the work of Faulkner, in the
general attitude and certain specific passages in Robert Penn
Warren, and, most significantly, in the advent of Ralph Ellison,
one sees the beginnings--at least--of a more genuinely penetrating
search. Mr. Ellison, by the way, is the first Negro novelist I have
ever read to utilize in language, and brilliantly, some of the
ambiguity and irony of Negro life.
About my interests: I don't know if I have any, unless the
morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make
experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat
and drink---it's my melancholy conviction that I've scarcely ever had
enough to eat (this is because it's impossible to eat enough if
you're worried about the next meal)--and I love to argue with
people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to
laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people
whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are
earnest about anything. I don't like people who like me because I'm
a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident
grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country
in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to
criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the
finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be
pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find,
therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world
hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have
many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as
Hemingway says, and get my work done.
I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
Continues...
Excerpted from Baldwin
by James A. Baldwin
Copyright © 1998 by James A. Baldwin.
Excerpted by permission.
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