Evening Standard, July 1971
A chat with James Baldwin can be a pleasant, jokey, easy-going relaxed affair, but an interview with him can be very hard work. He differentiates between the two encounters. Not I.
As soon as he believes an interview has begun he switches on a new persona, forgets that it’s he, Jimmy, who is being interviewed, and discusses race in a series of esoteric polemics, turning every question back to the interviewer, and then watching him wonder how to answer with a piercing gaze out of those great round eyes.
The trouble is that it gets very difficult to know what to say, and worse, before long you find yourself playing his game of turning his statements over and tossing them back towards him, hoping that he’ll carry on and eventually illuminate us all.
When I went to see him I was determined not to get caught up in the matter of race, as virtually everyone else who has written about him in the last ten years seems to have done. But it is impossible. There are, I know, many, many things he can discuss other than race, but he appears to assume that since he has become so famous as an articulate black man, then it is colour that he will be expected to talk about.
He is sitting in the corner of a Grosvenor Square hotel lobby with his brother, David, an actor and wit, and a representative of his publishers. A strangely fey man of forty-six, his hands butterfly around his face as he talks.
In the last ten years, since the overwhelming success of his early novels Go Tell It On The Mountain and Another Country, Baldwin, the Harlem child and eldest of nine, has seemingly accepted without dissent the cloak of being a black symbol. Yet he continues to live outside America, at present working from a home in the South of France.
Does he not feel alienated from Harlem by his success, I ask.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Success depends upon your point of view.’ Long pause. ‘I don’t feel alienated. I find Harlem everywhere. Here in London if you like.’ Longer pause. ‘It’s all over. In the music. You call it rock and roll. That isn’t what we call it. I know the price paid for it. How it got here. And why it’s here.’
‘You once described yourself as “a very tight, tense, lean, abnormally ambitious, abnormally intelligent and hungry black cat”, – I’m not sure why.’
The Baldwin brothers smack their hands together and hoot: a family enjoying a private joke.
‘I’m not modest. I can’t afford to be. You called me a world figure. I have to accept that. And whoever that happens to has to go through some very difficult changes. I’m a very arrogant man. I’ve had to be. But between me and my work I’m very modest … I know I’m not equal to what I see.
‘The piece of paper is a terrifying thing. You can be arrogant with your girlfriend or your boyfriend. But you can’t be arrogant when you’re trying to do something which is impossible to do. Then you lean towards humility.’ His eyes are about five inches away from mine.
‘Some reviewers have suggested that they are tired of seeing you making your private hell your public persona,’ I say, and inwardly shelter from the inevitable reaction. Baldwin looks at me with a cool toleration.
‘My dear, I’m not talking about my private hell. I’m talking about something else altogether in my work. And I’ve used myself as a witness. I’m not talking about Jimmy Baldwin. I’m talking out of him. There’s no reason for you to care how Jimmy Baldwin suffers. I’m not so abject. I’m not a beggar. But I’m using a technique to make you use something …’
At this moment an American tourist passes through the lobby with a Stars-and-Stripes handbag. The Baldwins laugh again, grasping hands momentarily.
He goes on: ‘I know I’ve been condemned for being self-pitying, but I’m happy that I haven’t stopped in my work. I’ll never know whether being labelled as the angry, young, articulate, black man has helped or hindered my career. Time has proved that I had something to be angry about. And I’ve never been bitter. If I had I would have been much less talkative.
‘You think that black people come out of the skull fully grown. And that when you’ve heard of us we should be happy that you’ve heard of us. I don’t mean you personally, and when I talk about “I” I don’t mean Jimmy.’
Why do you live so much in France, I ask. An obvious diversion.
‘The French left me alone which was what I needed. I wanted to be able to make it or not. The English are like Americans. And that maybe truer than you think.’ Long silence.
‘I’m not talking about racism. The French are equally as racist as the English. But you have a different attitude towards you own flesh. It’s part of your Puritanism. That’s what makes you so problematical.’
We’re interrupted momentarily as a couple of middle-aged white American tourists walk over and shyly ask Baldwin if he’d care to autograph a copy of his new book. Certainly, he smiles.
‘Thank you very much, sir,’ says the man, and Baldwin goes on with his dissertation.
‘The French haven’t got the same sort of sexual paranoia that you have. If I’m walking down the street in London with a white girl there’s a certain reaction from your, shall we say, working class. I wouldn’t get the same reaction in France from their working class. The Frenchman assumes no one can take his woman away from him. But you assume that I’ve only got to beckon and she’ll come running to my bed. That’s your madness, not mine. And it’s true of all of you. I don’t know why. That’s a question you must answer.’
Would he agree that some of his books are fuelled on sex, I ask.
‘Which gas station, Shell, Texaco, BP? That’s not a comment about me. It’s a comment about you. No one accuses a dirty novelist of being dirty. Only the serious ones. It comes back to you. It’s your attitude.’
‘I was thinking particularly of Another Country.’
‘I’m sure. Someone told me there were 189 sexual encounters in Another Country. It’s a love story, involving several people who try to love each other.’
Presently he’s working on a new novel about a young girl in Harlem who is expecting a baby. The novel is about her watching the world her baby will be born into, he says. A world that is not a civilisation.
The conversation becomes very involved, and I don’t truly understand what he’s trying to tell me. For some reason I mention that he appears to be polarising everything we are discussing. He becomes quite excited, talking almost evangelically. He once was an evangelical preacher.
‘You talk about polarisation as though I was never on a Virginia plantation working for you, picking your cotton, building your railroads and your cities and letting you sell my sons. When you talk of polarisation it’s because the tide has turned. It was always polarised. You polarised it. You invented the word black. I didn’t. And you pretended you were civilised and I was not. You’re confronted with a bill that no one can help you pay. The bill of your history. And you’re going to have to pay it. If it isn’t faced there’s no hope for you.’
‘Nor for you either?’
‘Oh no. You are the minority. The world is not white.’
‘Nor black.’
‘It’s not white. The Chinese weren’t considered yellow, nor the Indians brown. They were treated like niggers. Yes, my dear, let me point out to you that there are not many people who would tell you this. I’m accused of hating white people. But that is not true. If I did I wouldn’t talk to you at all. The dangerous people are the street sweepers, the bus drivers, the porters.’
Does he see no hope for us?
‘That depends upon you.’
‘And you.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ve paid my dues. I can no longer come to you. It’s very difficult for people to become disentangled from their history.’
‘But I always feel great hope when I see the social progress that has taken place in my lifetime …’
‘No, darling.’ he says. ‘Don’t fool yourself. Try to tell that to a black kid of seventeen.’
‘But I have such faith in human nature. When a man falls down in the street five people rush to pick him up.’
He looks at me disdainfully. ‘Yes, I know. But those same five people would stone that man to death, especially if he were after their jobs.’
So far as he is concerned the interview is over and he begins to tell stories about his times in the South with Dr Martin Luther King.
‘Once I flew down to Birmingham, Alabama, and Martin had warned me never to arrive in Birmingham after dark, but I got on the wrong plane. So when I got there I didn’t know what to do, and sat down on my typewriter. I wanted to go right across town to the black district where I was to stay, but in Birmingham in those days you just didn’t call a taxi if you were a black man. There was a city law which said that white drivers couldn’t take black men.
‘So I asked a black porter if he could get someone to call a taxi for me from the black part of town. But after forty minutes of sitting there it hadn’t come. And everyone was watching me. And I was watching them, too.
‘Then suddenly a cab pulls in, with a white driver, and he offers to take me. And then I really am in trouble. Because I know I have to go on a long dark car journey, past a lot of trees, and to a black man in the South trees are things to be frightened of, but if I don’t go I have to stay at the airport and maybe there are some trees around there, too.
‘So I decide to go with him. And he was a really nice man. We both wanted to talk, but we just weren’t able. We had no point of communication. It was very sad …’
‘And you know,’ says brother David. ‘All that cat saw when he drove into that airport and saw you sitting there, was food for his wife and kids …’
