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Doom and glory of knowing who you are by JANE HOWARD {#55bb .graf .graf—h3 .graf—leading .graf—title name=“55bb”}
In today’s literary circles it is a sign of considerable chic to know James Baldwin well enough to refer to him as Jimmy. Baldwin’s telephone number, unlisted in the Manhattan directory, is such a badly kept secret that it has to be changed every few months. His phone rings relentlessly even at 3 a.m., often as not, five or six people are gathered in his 2½ -room walk --- up drinking his Scotch and listening to records. “You always go back to Jimmy’s after an evening,” one of his friends says, “never anybody else’s. He’s got to hear that music.” That music consists largely of Ray Charles, Mahalia Jackson and the Abyssinian Baptist Gospel Choir.
Of the people who surround him and keep his phone busy not many are Baldwin’s real friends. Those he really cares for, a group that includes his prolific family, Martin Luther King, Actors Sidney Poitier and Rip Torn, are either too busy or too compassionate to take much of his time. Many of the ones who are around offer him little but confusion. “They don’t know,” he says, “that to get you have to give, and giving, baby, isn’t a day at a bargain counter but a total risk of who you are and what you think you want to be.”
Baldwin, who calls nearly everyone but old people and clergymen “baby,” reflects that “Fame can lead to just as many disasters as poverty. Since I got to my grits --- I mean, since I’ve had enough to eat --- around two years ago, I’ve been as lonely as I ever was in my life. Now that I’m technically and legally a celebrity, I find that people don’t look at me any more than when I was an anonymous cat in Harlem.”
Maybe as a consequence, Baldwin scrutinizes other people with a shattering intensity. His huge, protruding eyes, usually a little bloodshot, gaze unwaveringly and for record lengths of time into the eyes of whomever he is talking to. “Eyes,” he claims, “are the only way to tell who you can trust.” For those who know him it is a point of honor never to avert their eyes from his. It is also a little like being on the losing end of a children’s game of who-can-out --- stare-whom. Rarely does anybody outstare James Baldwin.
On all his small gestures, Baldwin lavishes twice the ordinary amount of nervous energy. He thinks “the question isn’t whether you’re happy or unhappy but alive or dead.” Although he can be de --- spondent or two hours late to an appointment, there’s never the slightest doubt that he’s alive. When friends leave his apartment, he hugs and kisses them before he calls “Ciao, baby.” When he goes into a restaurant or bar, he delays ordering until he has fed a coin to the jukebox. While he talks on the phone he carries it in his hand as far as the cord will allow, into the kitchenette and then halfway across the living room, stopping now and then to pencil a face in his appointment calendar. When he boards a plane, he grabs a hand --- ful of plastic --- bound magazines as soon as he has shrugged off his fleece --- lined Scottish suede coat. He riffles through half of them by the time the “No Smoking” sign dims.
He can’t drive a car, but when he one he’s in gets a flat tire he is quickly outside and squatting to peer at the calamity as though his forte were not words but hubcaps and jacks. And when he comes across a child anytime, anywhere, he bends over to lift it to his lap. “You can’t fool kids,” he observes. “A three --- year --- old boy can tell perfectly well whether he’s wanted around the house or not.”
Baldwin was the eldest of nine children who grew up on 131st Street in Harlem. He was a skinny child with a big gap between his two front teeth. His father told him, “You’re the ugliest boy I ever saw.” His father worked in a Queens ginger ale factory weekdays and preached on Sundays. Young James was a junior minister in another church for three years, but one Sunday when he was 17 a friend dared him to cut service and go to a matinee of H.M.S. Pina --- fore. He took the dare and has never been a practicing Baptist since.
“I was learning then that the terrible thing about being a writer is that you don’t decide to be one, you discover that you are one,” he says. He turned down two college scholarships to help support the family by working in restaurant kitchens, writing continually on the side, and getting little sympa --- thy for it. “In this country artists aren’t recognized until they’ve earned $2,000 or won a prize. Until then, if you tell someone you’re a writer he says, ‘Yeah, well I mean, what do you do?’ If you’re an artist, you’re guilty of a crime: not that you’re aware, which is bad enough, but that you see things other people don’t admit are there.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is to tell that. I’m not trying to solve any --- body’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are.
“I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too. I want to be a great artist, not just a very good one.”
But as Baldwin’s reputation grows, so does the distance be --- tween him and his typewriter. He can’t write at all in New York City. (“I wish I didn’t have to live there. It’s the most hostile city I’ve ever been in, but there’s no place else I could possibly be based.”) His life has become so chaotic that in order to concentrate he has to flee to Is --- tanbul, Paris, London, Switzer --- land, or an almost as remote Con --- necticut retreat. Between writing periods, when he’s more or less in residence in Manhattan, Baldwin the Artist becomes Baldwin the Spokesman. In auditoriums he speaks to overflow crowds, the microphone cord draped about his neck, plane tickets in his pocket and telegrams in hand asking if he’s free the 17th of next month to talk about The Essayist as Novelist, or The Novelist as Playwright, or How Whites Regard Negroes, or How Negroes Regard Whites.
On all these topics Baldwin has outspoken convictions which he can deliver on almost no notice in a dazzling, fluent rhetoric drawn from the stately cadences of the Old Testament, the glib breath --- lessness of postgraduate cocktail parties and the funky argot of Harlem. To hear one James Baldwin talk is by no means to have heard them all. On a hectic two --- day speaking tour to New Orleans for the Congress of Racial Equality, he gave five planned and three spontaneous talks. They all ended up dealing with the racial question, but each was in its own language, aimed at its own audience. He spoke one way to anxious white liberals, another way to earnest Negro students who had been hurt in the McComb riots, and in still another vein to English majors at segregated colleges --- but he made the same points each time.
He made some people mad but never failed in his expressed aim to “shake them up, disturb the peace, get them to ask real ques --- tions.” They disturbed him, too, as all his audiences do.
“I was the first Negro to address a senior class at Yale --- make of that what you will --- and of those 1,000 men very few could phrase a sentence. Americans are the most inarticulate, illiterate people I’ve ever met, totally unlettered in the language of the heart, totally dis --- trustful of whatever cannot be touched.
“Most Americans lead lives they deny, and they find it almost im --- possible to be coherent on any level. You have to listen very hard to a college president or an elevator op --- erator to find out what it is he’s really saying. They are both trapped between the language imposed on them, which is not theirs, and what they really want to say, which they don’t trust.”
To unwind from the strain of speaking publicly, Baldwin drinks and dances and subjects himself to painful motel --- room bouts of intro --- spection. “I know I shouldn’t be doing all this speech --- making,” he says. “I never planned on it. It’s much too easy for me. I should be saying what I have to say at a type --- writer.”
Yet when he accepts an invita --- tion to speak, nothing stops him. In New Orleans recently he over --- slept on the day he was supposed to fly to Greensboro, N.C. to give a long --- promised CORE talk. Even --- tually he emerged from his room, holding a poetry manuscript a stu --- dent had asked him to criticize be --- fore he left. He was rushed into a rented car that raced to the airport, but it was too late: the plane was gone. There were no more flights that day to Greensboro. Everyone was silent.
“Well, Jimmy,” a CORE girl finally sighed, “it’s too bad, and they’ll be pretty disappointed in Carolina, but what can you do? The only way you could get there now would be charter a plane.”
“How much?” asked Baldwin.
“Go on, find out.”
He went into the unsegregated part of the air --- port bar to order a Scotch and criti --- cize the poetry manuscript. The others fanned out all over the air --- port, buttonholing anybody who knew anything about planes that might be chartered to fly to Greens --- boro. After a time one reported to Baldwin. “You’re not going to want to do it,” she said. “That flight would cost $680. You could get to Eu --- rope and back twice for $680.”
“Charter the plane,” said Baldwin. “I said I’d be in Greensboro tonight, and I will be.” A few minutes later his two-engine plane was aloft.
“My lawyers aren’t going to be too delighted with this little extravagance,” he admitted, “but what else is there to do? What’s money for?
“I didn’t become a writer to earn a Cadillac or a splitlevel ranch house, and I wouldn’t quit writing if you gave them to me. And I didn’t become a writer to join the Cosmos Club --- somebody wanted to put me up for that, but I wasn’t interested. You know, one of the things I object to most about lib --- erals is the way they take me home to meet their mothers and buy me drinks and say, ‘Now really, Jim --- my, just between us, what have you got to cry about? You’ve made it, haven’t you?’ I want to ask them: ‘Evidence would indicate I come from a long line of what we call field niggers,’” he said with a smile.
“For myself, I’d never have been con --- tent with obscurity, but I wasn’t aiming at Leonard Lyons’ column either, and I’m not going to settle for it. I write because --- I don’t know why I’m telling you this --- because every writer has only one story to tell, really, and I haven’t told mine yet.
“I want to do something new, to go places I’ve never been, and I don’t mean just geographically. I’m pushing a whole lot of different buttons to find out which ones. Right now I’m writing a play. “Most contemporary fiction, like most contemporary theater, is de --- signed to corroborate your fanta --- sies and make you walk out whis --- tling. I don’t want you to whistle at my stuff, baby. I want you to be sitting on the edge of your chair waiting for nurses to carry you out.” ::: ::: :::