James Baldwin - 100 Years Young

 I knew of James Baldwin when I was younger. This did not lead me to read him until I was in prison, and I still have not read his essays. My loss on both counts.

The Paris Review let  James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78 out from behind its paywall. Maybe it will not be open when this post sees the light of day, so quotes follow. I hope you will see the reasons to read Baldwin.

INTERVIEWER

Was there an instant you knew you were going to write, to be a writer rather than anything else?

BALDWIN

Yes. The death of my father. Until my father died I thought I could do something else. I had wanted to be a musician, thought of being a painter, thought of being an actor. This was all before I was nineteen. Given the conditions in this country to be a black writer was impossible. When I was young, people thought you were not so much wicked as sick, they gave up on you. My father didn’t think it was possible—he thought I’d get killed, get murdered. He said I was contesting the white man’s definitions, which was quite right. But I had also learned from my father what he thought of the white man’s definitions. He was a pious, very religious and in some ways a very beautiful man, and in some ways a terrible man. He died when his last child was born and I realized I had to make a jump—a leap. I’d been a preacher for three years, from age fourteen to seventeen. Those were three years which probably turned me to writing.

***

BALDWIN

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, “Look.” I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, “Look again,” which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think painters would help a fledgling writer more than another writer might? Did you read a great deal?

BALDWIN

I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac. I’m sure that my life in France would have been very different had I not met Balzac. Even though I hadn’t experienced it yet, I understood something about the concierge, all the French institutions and personalities. The way that country and its society works. How to find my way around in it, not get lost in it, and not feel rejected by it. The French gave me what I could not get in America, which was a sense of “If I can do it, I may do it.” I won’t generalize, but in the years I grew up in the U.S., I could not do that. I’d already been defined.

Read, read, read.

Speaking of Balzac, take a look at A Treasure Trove of Suppressed Feeling by Rob Latham from the Los Angeles Review of Books.

GRAHAM ROBB CONCLUDES his superb 1994 biography of Honoré de Balzac by observing that, after two ambitious ventures in the 1890s to translate all of the author’s vast corpus into English, most of Balzac’s work—save for a handful of frequently reprinted and retranslated titles—has since lapsed into relative obscurity. As a result, Robb asserts, “unknown masterpieces are waiting to be rediscovered.” Over the past two decades, NYRB Classics has made an admirable effort to rectify this neglect, bringing out four books with texts that have been newly translated, in some cases for the first time in over a century: The Unknown Masterpiece (trans. Richard Howard, 2000), a gathering of two novelettes that focus on art and artists; The Human Comedy (trans. Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan Stump, 2014), a gathering of 14 shorter works, including the brilliant novella The Duchesse de Langeais (1834); The Memoirs of Two Young Wives (trans. Jordan Stump, 2018), a luscious epistolary novel from 1842; and now The Lily in the Valley (trans. Peter Bush), a poignant 1836 novel that is one of the author’s most autobiographical.

Back to the Baldwin interview. where he cites Henry James! And gives some interesting advice on writing. (Hey, it makes me feel better about not writing very often in the first person, and not very comfortable with the idea.)

INTERVIEWER

Do you agree with Alberto Moravia, who said that one ought only to write in the first person, because the third projects a bourgeois point of view?

BALDWIN

I don’t know about that. The first person is the most terrifying view of all. I tend to be in accord with James, who hated the first-person perspective, which the reader has no reason to trust—why should you need this I? How is this person real by dint of that bar blaring across the page? 

About Henry James from Colin Burrow's Just say it, Henry (London Review of Books):

James wanted every sentence to be artful. What he could often forget, later in life, is that some sentences just need to say what they need to say. But the prefaces are by no means all mannerism and circumlocution. Some passages take you right inside the operations of the creative mind, or even a little beyond this world. A great instance comes in the preface to The American when James compares the writing of a novel to a tethered hot-air balloon ‘tied to the earth’ under which ‘we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination.’ We rise gradually into the air until the novelist imperceptibly cuts the cable that connects the balloon of fiction to the terrestrial world and his readers are suddenly all adrift: ‘The art of the romancer is, “for the fun of it”, insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him.’ Even in this magnificent description of how fiction can float free from the world I’m not sure the inverted commas around ‘for the fun of it’ add much, except to suggest that James is above what is vulgarly called ‘fun’. The adverb ‘insidiously’ does, I suppose, remind us that the author is not necessarily our friend when he sets us adrift in the stratosphere, and we might be in for a bumpy ride up there.

Why do these features of James’s late style seem so much more irritating in the prefaces than in the late fiction? The main reason is that his style developed for a particular purpose which was not literary criticism. By the late phase of his career he was chiefly interested in the operations of consciousness. He wanted in particular to explore the discrepancy between what a person (regarded as a centre of consciousness in a novel) is able or willing to see, and what is actually happening. That is a deliberately flat-footed way of describing what the later novels are up to, of course. But it can be valuable, occasionally, to bring the hot-air balloon of James’s fiction back to earth. This is for two reasons. One is that a crudely terrestrial paraphrase of James can help you grasp what he’s on about. The other is that a paraphrase can help you understand why he chose not to put something in that flat-footed way, and so enables you to think about what gets lost when you do so.

(For the first time, I have a real sense of what I have missed in reading Henry James, and have had a shock that this discrepancy is one that has also been an interest of mine. I just do not have the sentences.)

And some more advice to think about:

INTERVIEWER

How many pages do you write in a day?

BALDWIN

I write at night. After the day is over, and supper is over, I begin, and work until about three or four a.m.

INTERVIEWER

That’s quite rare, isn’t it, because most people write when they’re fresh, in the morning.

BALDWIN

I start working when everyone has gone to bed. I’ve had to do that ever since I was young—I had to wait until the kids were asleep. And then I was working at various jobs during the day. I’ve always had to write at night. But now that I’m established I do it because I’m alone at night.

INTERVIEWER

When do you know something is the way you want it?

BALDWIN

I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful. You know it’s finished when you can’t do anything more to it, though it’s never exactly the way you want it. In fact, the hardest thing I ever wrote was that suicide scene in Another Country. I always knew that Rufus had to commit suicide very early on, because that was the key to the book. But I kept putting it off. It had to do, of course, with reliving the suicide of my friend who jumped off the bridge. Also, it was very dangerous to do from the technical point of view because this central character dies in the first hundred pages, with a couple of hundred pages to go. The point up to the suicide is like a long prologue, and it is the only light on Ida. You never go into her mind, but I had to make you see what is happening to this girl by making you feel the blow of her brother’s death—the key to her relationship with everybody. She tries to make everybody pay for it. You cannot do that, life is not like that, you only destroy yourself. 

Considering that I find the character actors in the old movies make them richer, this should have been obvious:

INTERVIEWER

It’s frequently been noted that you are a master of minor characters. How do you respond to that?

BALDWIN

Well, minor characters are the subtext, illustrations of whatever it is you’re trying to convey. I was always struck by the minor characters in Dostoyevsky and Dickens. The minor characters have a certain freedom which the major ones don’t. They can make comments, they can move, yet they haven’t got the same weight, or intensity. 

But then I have difficulties with Dickens; he can get on my nerves. I did not read Dostoyevsky until prison. More evidence for reading more - regardless of your race or ethnicity. 

And even more - Emily Dickinson? Anyone else having their preconceptions challenged? Good.

BALDWIN

In my case it is due to the fact that I’m always doing some kind of research. And yes, I read many plays and a lot of poetry as a kind of apprenticeship. You are fascinated, I am fascinated by a certain optic—a process of seeing things. Reading Emily Dickinson, for example, and others who are quite far removed from one’s ostensible daily concerns, or obligations. They are freer, for that moment, than you are partly because they are dead. They may also be a source of strength. Contemporary novels are part of a universe in which you have a certain role and a certain responsibility. And, of course, an unavoidable curiosity.

sch 8/6