These were not really my creations they did not contain my history I might search in vain for ever for any reflection of myself. He brought, he wrote, "a special attitude" to "Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral of Chartres, and to the Empire State Building.
He used and adapted the tone of the great masters of English eloquence: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. It was something so all-pervasive in his work, both the essays and the fiction, that he may not have even noticed it, although he was alert to his strange relationship to tradition. However, he added something of his own to his inherited subject and the influences he listed. He listed them in Notes of a Native Son: "the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech - and something of Dickens's love for bravura". As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent and hatred were all around us."īaldwin began with a very great subject: the drama of his own life echoing against the public drama. A few hours after my father's funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker's chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. "On the same day," Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son (1955), "a few hours later, his last child was born. He was also concerned with style, with how you write a sentence, how you control the music and rhythms of prose.īaldwin was born in Harlem in 1924, the eldest of a large family. In his novels, he sought to explore the parts of the self which most of us seek to conceal. He made his essays out of his arguments with himself, and this gives them a compelling honesty and edge. The complexity of his character, the power of his prose and the abiding importance of his subjects make him a writer to argue with and confront as well as to admire. The relationship of all the speakers, and indeed of the audience, to Baldwin's work remains intense.
#THE ROCKPILE JAMES BALDWIN SKIN#
Was the colour of his skin more important than his sexuality? Was his religious upbringing more important than his reading of the American masters? Were his sadness and anger more important than his love of laughter, his delight in the world? Did his prose style, as the novelist Russell Banks claimed that evening, take its bearings from Emerson, or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, "a high-faggot style", or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American speech? Was it full of the clarity, eloquence and intelligence that Chinua Achebe suggested? And was Baldwin's involvement with the Civil Rights Movement a cautionary tale for other writers, as Hilton Als insisted, or one of the things we should most admire him for, as Amiri Baraka argued? Is his best book the book that hasn't yet appeared - a volume of his letters - as Hilton Als proposed? Are his essays his finest work, as many now believe? Are his early novels his enduring legacy, books which "blew my mind", as Chinua Achebe said that evening? It is hard to decide what part of him came first. He was the most eloquent man in the America of his time. He was also a deeply gregarious and social being. He also loved the bohemian world of Greenwich Village and Paris. He was steeped in the world of his Harlem childhood. He was also an agitator and a propagandist, political and engaged. He was, for some of his life, a pure artist, using Jamesian techniques and cadences. And what it tells us about Baldwin has to do with his contradictions, the large set of opposites which made up his personality. The speeches made it clear that James Baldwin's legacy is both powerful and fluid, allowing it to fit whatever category each reader requires, allowing it to influence each reader in a way that tells us as much about the reader as it does about Baldwin. Also, there were a large number of young black men who had come alone, who carried a book and an aura of seriousness and intensity. The audience for James Baldwin that evening could not be so easily categorised: it was, I suppose, half black, half white half young, half old three-quarters straight, a quarter gay. The audience was strange in general in New York an audience is either young or old (in the Lincoln Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell). The event was booked out and there were people standing outside desperately looking for tickets.
On 1 February 2001 eight writers came to pay homage to James Baldwin in the Lincoln Center in New York.