THE CENTENARY of the great African American novelist, essayist and Civil Rights activist James Baldwin was celebrated last month. Born in New York City on August 2nd, 1924, he died in St Paul de Vence in the south of France on December 1st, 1987, aged 63.
Chronologically he was a contemporary of the Beat Generation writers. He was also a black, gay writer with an impassioned political sense. This led, in part, to a deeply uneasy relationship with his birth nation and, at various points in his life, he made his home in Europe, most notably Paris.
He penned a sequence of novels which attracted wide acclaim but also controversy. He dealt with huge themes – religion, race, sexuality – from perspectives that, mid-century, were still largely marginalised if not rejected out of hand by the establishment.
As the Harlem-raised son of evangelicals, he candidly addressed some of the most highly charged topics of the day: the experiences of people of colour and the challenges faced by the homosexual in a white America little prepared for the social changes that were rearing their liberal head in the 1950s and 1960s.
Baldwin was at the heart of the debates that ensued and his fiction – Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962), to select some key examples – became acute commentaries on the profound shifts that were underway during that period.
Pictured above: James Baldwin
To consider James Baldwin’s place in the twentieth century and his ongoing relevance to our post-millennium life, but with particular reference to the Beats, we turned to a British academic who has taken a focused interest in both the novelist and that group of radical US poets who arose within a similar timeframe. Were there associations or did they operate in quite separate orbits?
Douglas Field is Professor of American Literature at the University of Manchester. His academic interests are broad but he has particular interests in Beat culture and also James Baldwin himself.
Field’s range is well illustrated in recent publications. He has contributed to the newly-minted Cambrige Companion to Jack Kerouac, edited by Steven Belletto, providing an essay on ‘Kerouac and the 1950s’. Further, he has just produced a form of memoir – Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father and Me – based on his own father’s 1965 encounter with Baldwin at Cambridge to be published later this year. He is also a founding editor of James Baldwin Review.
Pictured above: Douglas Field’s new book based on the memoir of his own father encountering Baldwin in debate with William F. Buckley in Cambridge in 1965
His other monographs and edited collections are many. He is the editor of American Cold War Culture (2015) and A Historical Guide to James Baldwin (2019) and the co-editor of Art, Culture & Ethics in Black White: Over 100 Years of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (2022) and Harold Norse: Poet Maverick, Gay Laureate. Further, with Jay Jeff Jones, he edited An Aesthetic of Obscenity (2016), an anthology of significant British Beat Jeff Nuttall’s fiction and the 50th anniversary edition of his Bomb Culture (2018).
Rock and the Beat Generation asked Douglas Field these questions. His answers are presented here…
SW: Baldwin emerges in a New York still feeling the impetus of the Harlem Renaissance. Is this an important influence? A counter perhaps to his evangelical upbringing?
DF: Baldwin was born in 1924 as the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement begins, but he rarely mentions his antecedents. In an interview near the end of his life in 1986 Baldwin was asked about the impact of the Harlem Renaissance and he recalled that he was ‘too young to realize what was going on around me.’
At his junior high school, Baldwin was taught by the poet Countee Cullen – a major figure in the literary scene of the 1920s and 1930s – but he does not discuss his work in much detail. He claimed that he only read Cullen and Langston Hughes when growing up but does not have much to say about Cullen.
Like Hughes, Baldwin underscored the importance of blues and jazz as model for his writing, but he had an uneasy relationship with the older writer. ‘Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts – and depressed that he has done so little with them,’ Baldwin began a review of Hughes’s Selected Poems in 1959.
In that same review, which was published in the New York Times, he wrote that he did not like all of Hughes’s famous poem, ‘The Weary Blues,’ ‘which copies, rather than exploits, the cadence of the blues’, a theme he addressed many years later. Hughes, Baldwin claimed, ‘[i]n a sense … no longer created the blues, he began to recite the blues.’
Baldwin’s reluctance to acknowledge the influence of the Harlem Renaissance is surprising on one level, but in other ways it fits into the writer’s refusal to be part of causes, movements and ideologies. He was, after all, a major African American writer who insisted on being called an American writer, and a pioneering writer of queer fiction who repeatedly questioned the labels of gay, straight, and bisexual. ‘All theories are suspect,’ Baldwin wrote early in his career.
Pictured above: Douglas Field. Both Baldwin and the Beats have been within his remit
SW: The Beat writers arise at a similar moment to James Baldwin’s establishment as a writer. Are either aware of the other? Which Beats does Baldwin correspond with/meet/befriend? Is there any important synergy at play?
DF: Baldwin and the Beats came of age at more or less the same time and there are indeed parallels. Baldwin and Kerouac, for example, turned to jazz and blues, rather than existentialism, to explore the condition of post-war US life. In musicians such as Charlie Parker, Kerouac and Baldwin recognised a distinctly American angst.
In the preface to Mexico City Blues (1959), Kerouac wrote that he wanted ‘to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session’, a description which anticipates Baldwin’s claim three years later that ‘I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way they sound.’
These parallels notwithstanding, it’s hard to find an instance where Baldwin does not lambast the Beats whom he referred to as ‘the Suzuki rhythm boys’. In his essay, ‘The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy’, Baldwin reflected on his relationship with Mailer, whom he associated with the current vogue of the Beat Generation. The two writers became firm friends in Paris and then fell out.
Mailer’s discussion of Baldwin in his collection of essays, Advertisements for Myself (1959), underscores the thawing of their friendship. ‘Baldwin seems incapable of saying “fuck you” to the reader,’ Mailer claimed, adding that ‘even his best sentences are sprayed with perfume,’ a cheap swipe at Baldwin’s sexuality. Giovanni’s Room, Mailer concludes, is ‘brave’ but ‘bad’, a comment that anticipates his post-mortem of Another Country, which he deemed to be ‘abominably written.’
In ‘The Black Boy Look at the White Boy,’ Baldwin quotes a notorious passage from Kerouac’s On the Road in which the narrator, Sal Paradise, ‘walked with every muscle aching among the lights of the 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro.’
Baldwin did not pull any punches: he castigated Kerouac for a passage that was ‘absolute nonsense’ and ‘offensive’, adding, ‘I would hate to be in Kerouac’s shoes if he should ever be mad enough to read this aloud from the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater.’ Baldwin had little truck with Kerouac’s confessional writing. ‘It is masturbation. It is not writing,’ Baldwin told an interviewer in the early 1960s. ‘I hate to say that, but it is true. I mean he’s talented. So is everybody at the age of 5.’
His views on the Beats did not change. ‘If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?,’ published in 1979, he mused on the appropriation of Black vernacular by the Beats, a group comprised of ‘uptight, middle-class white people, imitating poverty,’ pointing out that ‘Beat to his socks’ ‘was once the black’s most total and despairing image of poverty’ until it was commandeered –by Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and others.
As early as 1959, in a review of Langston Hughes’ Selected Poems, Baldwin noted how ‘the white world takes over this [African American] vocabulary – without the faintest notion of what it really means.’
Kerouac was certainly aware of Baldwin. According to Gerald Nicosia, the two met at a party in 1954. Kerouac, Nicosia claims, disliked Baldwin’s sexuality, while Baldwin was critical of Burroughs. It’s likely that Baldwin and Burroughs, and perhaps Ginsberg, All met in Paris, but I have not come across any substantial accounts. (Heathcote Williams claims that Burroughs and Baldwin knew each other well in Paris).
There are a few pictures of Ginsberg and Baldwin circulating online, but I don’t think they had a deep friendship even if they were connected in some ways in terms of their sexuality and political activism.
Pictured above: James Baldwin Review, a journal dedicated to the writer. Field is founding editor
SW: How do black Beats – Joans, Jones/Baraka and Kaufman, for example – regard Baldwin? How does he see those African American compatriots and contemporaries?
DF: Baldwin does not single out or exonerate Black writers during his broadsides against the Beat Generation. During the 1960s, he had a fractious relationship with LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka, who associated whiteness with homosexuality. Baraka, who saw Baldwin as too detached from radical politics to be authentically Black, made repeated digs at the older writer’s ‘gay exotic plumage’, one of several thinly veiled homophobic attacks. But when Baldwin died, the tables turned. In a fiery eulogy at Baldwin’s funeral in 1987, Baraka claimed that Baldwin was ‘God’s Black revolutionary mouth.’
I’ve read snippets about Ted Joans and Baldwin’s friendship in Paris during the 1970s, but nothing substantial. My sense is that they moved in some of same circles and were friends, but I haven’t read any detailed accounts. On the album Rappin Elite, a vinyl compilation of Bob Kaufman recordings produced by Unrequited Records, there’s a moment when he’s riffing in a bar and then gives a shout out to Baldwin’s essay about Mailer, ‘The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy.’
SW: What is Baldwin’s musical manifesto? Are singers & musicians important to him? Does he express allegiance/loyalty to jazz or blues or popular musical styles more generally? Is Paris a factor in his developing his own tastes in this respect?
This is an important question, and a full answer would be book-length! Baldwin would claim that he didn’t ‘know anything about music’, but his fiction and non-fiction is punctuated with references to the blues, gospel and jazz, as are the titles of many of his works of fiction: Go Tell it on the Mountain, Just Above My Head (a spiritual that Ida sings in Another Country), If Beale Street Could Talk, and his most anthologized short story, ‘Sonny’s Blues’, and the play Blues for Mister Charlie to name but a few.
Many of Baldwin’s fictional characters are musicians, including the singer Ida in Another Country, her brother Rufus who is a drummer, and the jazz musician Luke in the play The Amen Corner. In an early essay, ‘Many Thousands Gone,’ (1951), Baldwin suggested that music itself was the fundamental expression of black American culture. ‘It is only in music,’ Baldwin wrote, ‘that the Negro in America is able to tell his story.’
He was friends with Nina Simone and Miles Davis and went to jazz clubs in Paris during the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but he saw the importance of the blues, as well as gospel. In The Fire Next Time, there is an important essay in which Baldwin is deeply critical of the church, in which he describes the power and vitality of the music.
‘There is no music like that music,’ Baldwin writes, ‘no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord.’
And in his late works such as Just Above My Head, gospel music becomes central; a vehicle through which to explore the spiritual and the sexual. If jazz was Ted Joans’ religion, then perhaps gospel became Baldwin’s.
Editor’s note: Douglas Field will be in conversation with a fellow don of Manchester University when he speaks to David Olusoga about James Baldwin and the centenary at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in city on November 27th, 2024
O yea verily the Black Beats enigmatic and exotic and assimilation into as Michal McClure related to me at thr beat poets crib in Haight Ashbury: the Black Bests & talent were assimilated into a Beat Beat Generation of mostly white poets