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It's Hard to Be James Baldwin
Herbert R. Lottman/1972

From Intellectual Digest, 2 (July 1972), 67-68.

For over a year James Baldwin has been living in the south of France, in a large house among olive and orange trees, just outside the medieval hilltop town of St.-Paul-de-Vence. Once in a while Baldwin comes up to Paris on business, and on one of these recent trips we met for some talk in the dim, cloistered bar of the Pont Royal hotel.

Baldwin is small and wiry, with a dancer's build. You feel he can concentrate his forces that much more, being small. But if you watch him carefully, watch his facial expression, particularly his mouth, when he makes a joke or underlines the irony of a situation, you think you see something else, a vulnerability, a pain he works at concealing. The smile that follows is whistling a happy tune.

Q: Do you require the calm you seem to be getting in St. Paul?

Baldwin: I need a certain kind of privacy. It's very hard to describe or explain, but you know that it's also very hard to be James Baldwin.

Q: When did you last work in a city?

Baldwin: I suppose that would be Hollywood [in 1968]. What I'm trying to do has driven me farther and farther out of the cities. In America I've been considered not so much a writer as an angry young man. At 47 I'm still a dancing dog. You can't spend all your time on television and work too. By the way, I'm not complaining about that. But it's important for me to know what I am...

Q: Let's talk about your main project, If Beale Street Could Talk. Should I know what and where Beale Street is?

Baldwin: It's a street in Memphis that W.C. Handy wrote about in his "Beale Street Blues." You know,

If Beale Street could talk,

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If Beale Street could talk,

Married men would have to take their beds and walk.

Q: Are you in this book more or less than usual?

Baldwin: A writer is always more or less in his book. You try to keep yourself out, or you try not to distort, not to let your prejudices distort. In Beale Street, for instance, the girl is telling the story. You can say I'm the girl, or the boy or their unborn child.

Q: Is she talking in your language or in her own?

Baldwin: She's a girl from the streets, as I'm a boy from the streets.

Q: What exactly is the story?

Baldwin: Her lover is in Attica, and a lot of her story is in her trips to the prison. Actually, I began writing before the Attica events. But I have a friend there. Part of the key to the book is the prison situation. She is wondering what is going to happen to the baby, and he is wondering too. He's in prison on charges of stealing a television set -- he was sent up on a bullshit tip. He's still in jail when the book ends.

Q: Is he in prison for a limited term or is it one of those indefinite things?

Baldwin: Ask the American people that, don't ask me.

Q: Would you say that the book is giving you more problems than you usually have in your writing, or fewer, or what?

Baldwin: Luckily you don't remember the problems you had before, or you wouldn't continue. To try to tell a story from the point of view of a pregnant woman is something of a hazard. I tried to avoid it, but she's the only one who can tell the story. There are nine chapters, one for each month of her pregnancy. The book ends with the birth of the baby. That's what it's about, our responsibility to that baby.

Q: What other problems have you had with Beale Street?

Baldwin: You're always in difficulty with a book. There was the problem of interruptions, other projects, travel, illness. The trick is not to use these other things to get in the way of the book. You go through all kinds of shit before you actually sit down to write. And when you do sit down and these problems are all behind you, they were so painful that you cannot really discuss them.

As a matter of fact all writers have the same problems. The invention

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has to be organic, not a gimmick. It has to come out of your relationship to the subject. You work on it for years and one fine day, if you haven't lost your nerve, it works. It comes alive. And then it's over, and it doesn't belng to you anymore.

Q: Jimmy, would you say that new times require new media? Are you moving away from traditional literature?

Baldwin: Art isn't traditional. Mine isn't in any case. I'm not part of the television and tape age, but I can understand people 20 or 30 years younger than myself who grew up in it, whose minds have been formed by it. I'm not for or against it -- I see these things as forms you have to learn how to use. I'm the kind of person who needs to see the page, but that's not a moral position or anything like that.

Q: Do you feel that you communicate better with readers as time goes on, or do you feel that words -- or readers -- are still difficult to attain?

Baldwin: I never thought of my reader in that way. He'd have to be a very particular reader in any case -- even in the past that was so. Now all bets are off. What's happening in America was clear to me many years ago, and to many people. Now we can only wait until we see what happens on the other side of the holocaust. It's not American, by the way, it's global.

Q: But communication in itself. Does it come harder, or easier?

Baldwin: There's no sense saying communication is easy. What is communicated by television? It is always harder to communicate. If you see at all, I think as time goes on you see more, and it becomes more difficult to convey what you see because you yourself would rather not see it.

Q: Who is in your audience now?

Baldwin: I have no idea. I'd think it would be the young, white and black. I know that my books are read in the black communities, logically in paperback editions. I'm surely a problematical figure for many in the Afro-American world. On balance they trust me -- I think. I know what my position is in any case. I know I love them. I don't know about them loving me.

A writer writes because he has to. It's not as calculated as it seems. A writer lives for years getting rejection slips, and if you're black... You don't think of your public. Something drives you. The turning

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point for me was when I left America. In two ways: something happened to me -- I found out things I didn't know when I was home. And I was here, which made me a very odd object altogether. It was a turning point. I had been a published writer since 1946. Abroad I became freer. I trusted myself more and trusted my work. I ceased being corralled as a Negro writer.

Q: Have you found that your attitude has changed as the world changed?

Baldwin: I'm much sadder now, which doesn't mean that I'm discouraged. When you are 20 you see the world one way and when you're older you see it another way. You see yourself in another way as well.

Q: In what way?

Baldwin: I see myself as someone who is trying to become an artist.

Q: Do you feel that you are in opposition to those who think art should be secondary to protest? Are you still fighting that battle?

Baldwin: I'm not fighting with others at all. The only one I'm fighting is myself. I am my only problem. My integrity as a man is involved. If a man happens to be an artist, that's the terrain on which the battle is fought.

Q: Well, do you yourself sometimes feel that you should be a polemicist rather than a writer of finished works?

Baldwin: It's not one of my choices. I haven't done it, which means that I haven't wanted to.

Q: Among younger writers, whom do you admire?

Baldwin: There is Ernest Gaines, whose latest work is The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and George Cain, author of Blueschild Baby. Nikki Giovanni has written four fine books of poetry. They are all black Americans, all very important. They're very important to me, and should be to everyone else.

Q: Do you have any followers?

Baldwin: I wouldn't be able to tell. I don't have a school in any case.

Q: May I ask what you think is going to happen back home?

Baldwin: I've already said that I see a holocause coming. That is the subject of my new book, No Name in the Street, which appeared in the United States this spring. It is the story of the civil rights movement

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up to the death of Martin Luther King, but it's not a documentary. It's a personal book -- my own testimony.

Everyone overlooks the impact on the black population of our country of the present Administration, and that is very sinister. It's an insult to every black American that the President of the United States should be in competition with the governor of Alabama for votes. The civil rights laws? Bullshit.

Q: What do you mean by holocaust?

Baldwin: Americans who have managed to learn nothing are now about to learn a great deal.