Three Must-Read Books About James Baldwin

There are three books about James Baldwin that are still on my Must-Read -Cover-To-Cover list. Two of them I never got a chance to finish.

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of Baldwin's birth, a perfect time to begin reading them as a way to commemorate that significant event.

1. Baldwin's Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin by Herb Boyd (Atria Books, 2008).

2. Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie Glaude Jr. (Crown, 2020).

3. The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America by Nicholas Buccola (Princeton University Press, 2019).

James Baldwin's One Hundredth Birthday

Today, August 2, would have been the 100th birthday of the eloquent and influential author James Baldwin (1924-1987) . One good way to commemorate his centennial year is to read a book or essay by or about him.

James Baldwin's Centennial Year

This year, in August, will mark what would have been the esteemed novelist/essayist James Baldwin's 100th birthday.

James Baldwin Was A Lefty

I have read several biographies of the black novelist/essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987) and seen many photos and documentaries about him. None, as far as I can remember, indicated which hand he favored when he set pen to paper.

Just when I thought I knew all there was to know about Baldwin, it turns out that not only did he lean leftward in his socio-political views, he also wrote with his left hand. (I wonder if any of his teachers ever tried to dissuade him from left-handed writing, since most people are right-handed.)

In the book, The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Debate over Race in America by Nicholas Buccola (Princeton University Press, 2019), which is about the famous 1965 war of ideas between the two men at Cambridge University in Britain, there is a photo of Baldwin at his writing table. The photographer beautifully captured Baldwin as he sat, shirt collar open, necktie untied around his neck, deeply concentrating on what he was writing. Between the fingers of his right hand was the ever-present cigarette, in his left hand a pencil. Near at hand was a Dixie cup either of water or his favorite booze. It was probably the latter.

I acquired the book more than a week ago when it was among several hardcover books my local public library was offering for free. When I begin reading it, I am sure I will discover other details of Baldwin's life previously missing from other books.

After seeing that photo, I began wondering if the two James Baldwin biopics that are soon to be released noted his left-handedness. I will be paying close attention to their accuracy.

How About A James Baldwin Biopic?

Earlier today I re-read the chapter on James Baldwin in Christopher Bram's wonderful book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America (Twelve/Hachette Book Group), published in 2012. The chapter is an excellent summation of Baldwin's life and literary career.

What prompted me to re-read the chapter was the idea that came to me that Baldwin's life, especially his early life, would make a riveting biopic. Drawing on previous biographies and his essays, the film would trace his evolution as a writer from his impoverished childhood in Harlem to his first few years in Paris where he, as an American expatriate, struggled to survive while completing his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).

I think this would be the sort of cinematic project that would interest directors like Barry Jenkins, Ryan Coogler, and Ava DuVernay.

Concerning who would portray Baldwin, a good choice would have been the late Chadwick Boseman, who somewhat resembled Baldwin. Unfortunately, since Boseman is no longer available, Don Cheadle, who did a brilliant job of portraying Miles Davis in Miles Ahead (2015), would be another possible choice.

Commemorating James Baldwin's Birthday

Yesterday, August 2nd, as I walked near the world-famous Apollo Theatre, its electronic marquee reminded me that it was James Baldwin's birthday. The fiery novelist/essayist, a son of Harlem, would have been 95 years old this year.

If Baldwin were still alive, no doubt his voice and pen would be highly critical of the Trump administration as well as the white supremacist alt-right movement, who are among Trump's avid supporters. And no doubt Trump would be on Twitter criticizing, perhaps ridiculing, Baldwin's comments. But Trump would be no match for Baldwin's eloquence and penetrating intellect.

Whose Harlem Is It?

"Around 123rd Street, an enormous luxury high-rise is going up. The people of the neighborhood have scrawled, in white paint, on the walls of the construction site: Where will we live? For Harlem is an exceedingly valuable chunk of real estate and the state and the city and the real-estate interests are reclaiming the land and urban renewalizing--or gentrifying--the niggers out of it."--James Baldwin, "Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?" (1986), published in Essence magazine (November 1996), quoted in Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?: Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era by Shannon King (New York University Press, 2015), page 1 (Introduction).

Now that gentrification has firmly taken root in Harlem, Baldwin's comments are still timely and relevant in the 21st century.

James Baldwin's "Beale Street" Novel Slated For The Big Screen

At the 56th New York Film Festival (September 28-October 14), to be held at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, there will be a screening of If Beale Street Could Talk, director Barry Jenkins's film adaptation of James Baldwin's novel of the same name. (Jenkins's last film was Moonlight, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 2017.)

The film, reported amNew York (August 8, 2018), is about "a young African-American man in 1970s Harlem who is arrested and convicted for a crime he didn't commit." (Could this be another Oscar contender in the fall?)

I've never read the book and may have a copy of it. If I do, it's probably buried among the hundreds of books I own. I may just buy a copy and read it before the film is released nationwide. It's slated for release on November 30.

James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" Had An All-White Cast

In Rosalind Rosenberg's otherwise fascinating biography of black writer, lawyer, and women's rights activist Pauli Murray*, Jane Crow (Oxford University Press, 2017), there is one bit of information I disagree with. Ms. Rosenberg describes James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room as "an explicitly bi-sexual, bi-racial novel." The bisexual aspect is correct since David, the novel's protagonist, had a romantic relationship with a female and Giovanni,who was, if I recall correctly, a bartender in Paris. But the book is not biracial because all the characters in it are white, the only such book that Baldwin wrote.

Christopher Bram, in his equally fascinating book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed  America (Twelve, 2012), writes that "Baldwin had several reasons for writing a novel with all-white characters. He wanted to escape the label of 'Negro novelist,' which was not only artistically limiting, it was commercially restrictive."  "Changing the race," continues Bram, "also enabled Baldwin to put distance between himself and his story: he wasn't writing about his life, he was writing about other lives. It gave his imagination more breathing room. In addition, there must have been bitter pleasure in putting himself inside a privileged white skin."

*Pauli Murray (1910-1985) believed herself to be a man trapped inside a female body, a belief others thought was a sign of some form of mental illness.

"Jane Crow" was the term Murray coined for gender discrimination. She saw it as a partner to "Jim Crow," the label for race discrimination. Black women were the victims of both forms of discrimination.





Note: Once again, Happy New Year, everyone! Let's hope 2018 will be a healthy, happy, productive, and prosperous year for all of us!

James Baldwin's Former Home In Greenwich Village

Last month, I went to Film Forum to see I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck's extraordinary Oscar-nominated feature-length documentary. It is based on James Baldwin's outline for a book that was never completed. The book was to be about the civil rights movement, American race relations, and the assassination of his friends, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

After seeing  I Am Not Your Negro, I went to the men's room. On my way out, I saw several pieces of film-related literature. The only exceptions were some cards distributed by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. In the center of each card was a color photograph of the bronze plaque placed by this organization on the facade of 81 Horatio Street. The plaque commemorates James Baldwin, who lived in the building from 1958 to 1961.

One of Baldwin's biographers, W.J. Weatherby, mentioned this residence in the biography and wrote that "Baldwin's apartment was two flights up in a rather drab building." Despite the building's drabness, this was one of the places where he wrote the novel, Another Country, published in 1962.

This townhouse, noted the card, "is a touchstone to Greenwich Village's history as an artist incubator, a progressive refuge, and an inclusive haven."

There is a Google map on the reverse side that has a long red line that extends from Film Forum's location on Houston Street to the Horatio Street building."Visit today," encouraged the historic preservation society via the message on the card, "and pay your respects to one of the Village's greatest and most influential residents." (www.gvshp.org)

I haven't visited the site yet, but I intend to when the weather gets warmer.

A Gay American In Paris

The format of the following script was based on CBS News' American Treasury 60-second between-daytime-program spots that were broadcast in the late 1980s. They highlighted famous American men and women and Americana.

I wrote this script and one other nearly ten years ago with the then-new gay channel LOGO in mind. I don't recall if I actually submitted  them to the cable channel. I do recall talking to someone at LOGO's California offices via phone about writing such scripts.

LOGO like CBS is owned by Viacom.

American Outlooks--Program 2

Writer: Charles M. Smith

June 18, 2005

OPENING LOGO AND THEME:

            (CELEBRITY NAME):

             I'm______with American Outlooks. His book be-                                                                                    came the first of its kind by a black American author.

             Who he was, after this.

COMMERCIAL: 15 SECS:

            (CELEBRITY NAME): CONTD:

           James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room is the story of two 

           gay lovers, one American, the other Italian, in post-war

           Paris. Baldwin was advised not to publish the ground-

           breaking novel for fear that its homosexual theme 

           would ruin his career. Baldwin ignored the advice and                                                                            the book, published in 1956, became a gay American

           classic.

CLOSING LOGO: :02 SECS:                  
            Learn more about James Baldwin in your local 

            library.

Note: I had to change the formatting of the script to make it more readable on the blog.

                                                                            

James Baldwin Went To School Here

Yesterday (April 17), I was strolling down Lenox Avenue, near 140th Street, in Harlem, when a school building caught my eye. As I stood across the street from the building I saw carved  into the facade above the entrance the words "Public School 139." It dawned on me that this might be the school that James Baldwin attended in the late 1930s before he moved on to DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. When I got home, I looked through my Baldwin biographies and confirmed that it was. P.S. 139, also known as  Frederick Douglass Junior High, was where Baldwin became the editor of The Douglass Pilot, the school magazine. It was also where poet Countee Cullen became one of his teachers as well as the faculty advisor to the literary club of which Baldwin was a member.

The five-story, red-brick  building is now the property of the New York City Housing Authority which has transformed the building from a place of learning into a senior citizens residence.

There's a sign on the building that states "Welcome To...P.S. 139 Senior Citizens Building," but I didn't see one commemorating James Baldwin as an alumnus of P.S. 139.

If Baldwin were alive today he would be almost 91 years old and eligible to live in the building where he once attended school.

An Early Biography Of James Baldwin

James Baldwin is one of my all-time favorite writers. I can never read enough by or about him. So I was delighted to find sitting on a public library shelf a copy of The Furious Passage of James Baldwin by Fern Marja Eckman. The book was originally published in 1966. It has been referred to in later biographies of Baldwin but I was never able to obtain a copy until now. The new edition was published in 2014.

The back jacket copy states that Eckman, who at the time was a reporter for the then liberal New York Post, "based this book on hours and hours of taped interviews with Baldwin and with the people who are significant in his story" and is "a profile told largely in his own words."

Because this biography was the first one written on Baldwin, his later years, covered in subsequent books, are missing. But nevertheless it gives readers an insight into Baldwin's early life, writing career, and personality. (The first few pages of the biography seem to be psychoanalyzing Baldwin and his rocky relationship with his stepfather.) At this writing, I am still reading the book which is riveting, although it reads more like a memoir than a standard biography.

Three Projects Harlem Pride Should Consider Doing

Here are three projects Harlem Pride should consider getting involved in:

1. Establishing a gay and lesbian community center. (One location to consider is the former site of the Mount Morris Baths on Madison Avenue at 125th Street. The site has been vacant for several years.)

2. The erection of a statue or monument honoring the late novelist/essayist James Baldwin, a native son of Harlem.

3. The resumption of Gay Night at the Cotton Club, hosted by Harlem Pride. (I wrote an article for the New York Native about this weekly Friday night event in 1984.)

James Baldwin's 90th Birthday

This year will mark what would have been James Baldwin's 90th birthday. I wish he was still with us.

James Baldwin, Author And Intellectual

In 1975, I took a 15-week magazine writing course at Hunter College's Midtown Branch, located on Lexington Avenue in the East 50s, in Manhattan. The instructor was an elderly woman named Camille Davied (pronounced Dah-vee-ay), whose late husband had been an editor at Reader's Digest. (I was the only person of color in the class.) My memory is a bit hazy about how James Baldwin's name got mentioned. Perhaps I wrote a class assignment that referenced him. Anyway, I do remember saying to her that Baldwin was an intellectual. She immediately and emphatically denied that he was. It was probably hard for her, a white person, to acknowledge that a black man could be that cerebral. Maybe the things that he wrote and said about American race relations touched a nerve, making her uncomfortable and self-conscious.

Had I known as much about Baldwin then as I do now, I would have pointed out to her that if Baldwin had not been an intellectual, his essays would never have appeared in Partisan Review, Commentary, and other intellectual journals in the 1950s.

A Leap Into Eternity

In the introduction to For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Still Not Enough (Magnus Books, 2012), the enjoyable anthology edited by Keith Boykin, he ponders about Tyler Clementi, the gay young man who leaped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. "As I drive across the George Washington Bridge one night from Manhattan to the CNBC World Headquarters in New Jersey, I looked down over the bridge and imagined what it must have felt like to jump 212 feet into the raging Hudson River below."

Fifty years earlier, James Baldwin no doubt had the same thoughts about his friend Eugene Worth who leaped from the same bridge in the late 1940s. Baldwin recreated that act in his 1962 novel Another Country. In that book, Baldwin had the character Rufus leap from the GWB at the end of Chapter One. Boykin could have put himself in the shoes of Clementi and Rufus as he read the following description by Baldwin: "...and then the wind took him, he felt himself going over, head down, the wind, the stars, the lights, the water, all rolled together, all right. He felt a shoe fly off behind him, there was nothing around him, only the wind,...."

I wanted to include these passages in my online review of For Colored Boys, but I couldn't see how to fit it in seamlessly.

Racism Should Not Be A Part Of Gay Pride

Letters to the Editor
The Village Voice
842 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
June 28, 1984

Dear Editor:

James Baldwin, in his interview with Richard Goldstein [Voice, June 26], hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that "the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society."

Racism, as Baldwin knows, is very much a fact of life within the gay community. It is evident in the discriminatory admission policies of gay bars and discos across the country and in the near total exclusion of blacks and other third world gays in gay magazines and newspapers. The "invisibility" of black gays and lesbians is what prompted me to write articles in the gay press pointing up the fact that blacks are a vocal and active part of the gay community. The white, middle-class male image being projected in these publications (and subsequently carried by the straight media) helps to foster the homophobic view in the black community that homosexuality as well as AIDS is a "white disease."

Until the white gay community is willing and able to accept black gays and lesbians as full and equal partners in the struggle against heterosexist oppression, they have no right to complain about homophobia. They too have become oppressors. That's not my idea of Gay Pride.

Sincerely yours,
Charles Michael Smith

This letter was not published.

Book Review: "James Baldwin" By Randall Kenan

James Baldwin by Randall Kenan (Chelsea House, 144 pages, illustrated)
Reviewed by Charles Michael Smith

Randall Kenan's James Baldwin is a biography of the late writer that's mostly a rehash of previous Baldwin biographies and books on the civil rights movement. So the information in its pages is old hat to those familiar with its sources.

But James Baldwin is not aimed at an adult audience. Its audience are those gay and lesbian teens who, writes Martin Duberman in the preface, are "unable to find in his or her family's traditions--as other minority people often do--a compensatory source of validation for the deprecations of mainstream culture." (Duberman, an historian and biographer of Paul Robeson, is the general editor of the Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians series, of which Kenan's book is a part.) For these young readers, the information about Baldwin's life, literary career, and times will be very fresh and, I believe, engrossing.

Kenan , an award-winning African-American author, has done an excellent job of retelling Baldwin's inspiring story in language that is accessible and beautiful. Among the things young readers will learn are the following: that Baldwin had been a child preacher; that despite his lack of a college education, he wrote for "some of the most important intellectual journals of the day"; and that his 1963 nonfiction book, The Fire Next Time, was on the bestseller list for 41 weeks.

The only drawback is the opening chapter, "Into the Fire," which summarizes the history of the civil rights movement without first establishing to young readers who Baldwin, an influential participant, was.

Despite that one flaw, James Baldwin is a wonderful way to introduce a new generation to the life and writings of the Harlem native who "somehow found the fortitude to write and speak the truth as he saw it, no matter how painful, controversial, or dangerous."

Originally published in Whazzup! Magazine (Oakland, California), August 1996.

Pantheon Books recently released an anthology of James Baldwin's uncollected writings called The Cross of Redemption, edited by Randall Kenan.

Who Am I?

Question: His book became the first of its kind by an African American author. Who was he?

Answer: James Baldwin.
The book, Giovanni's Room, is the story of two male lovers--one is an American, the other is an Italian--living in post-war Paris. It's homosexual theme was so controversial that Baldwin was advised not to publish it for fear it would ruin his career. Baldwin ignored such sentiments and the book, published in 1956, has become not only a classic gay novel, but an American one as well.
Learn more about James Baldwin at your local library.