I dont see the contradiction which some people point out as inherent, though I can sense what Ralph, among others, means by that. Still, the breakthrough is important, and the point is that an American writer, in order to achieve it, very often has to leave this country. thats a European approach, which never made any sense to me. 129. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. No, no, you see, I dont want to make that kind of dichotomy. Everything is contingent, of course, on what you take yourself to be. Its kind of give-and-take. I minded it when I was younger. Richard and Cass were part of the decor. Its a terrible way to make a living. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac. Responding to history, I think a person is in sight of his or her death around the age of forty. If you dont like their alternative, write yours. Perhaps Im afraid to. The writer is trying to make the readers see something, trying to convince them of something. This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwins struggle as a writer. If I wanted to survive as a writer I would eventually have had to write a book like Another Country. Well, the first one was the most important in terms of moralethe Saxton Fellowship in 1945. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature, Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window), When Writing is Your Job, Researching Trauma Can Be a Workplace Hazard, What Culture Shock Taught Me About Sci-Fi and Fantasy Storytelling. Altogether, I found it too simpleminded. When did you first conceive of leaving black characters out of Giovannis Room? It is not meant, of course, to imply that it happens to them all, for Europe can be very crippling, too; and, anyway, a writer, when he has made his first breakthrough, has simply won a crucial skirmish in a dangerous, unending and unpredictable battle. But perhaps it makes senseI grew up in a place where I saw the sea every day and, near the end of my life, Im living in a place where the water has run out. I didnt know how to continue, didnt see my way clear. I have never felt comfortable as a speaker, no. Sleeping on rooftops and in the subways. Talent is insignificant. Is that of any interest to you? And I did feel much older than that. Ida and Vivaldo were the first people I was dealing with, but I couldnt find a way to make you understand Ida. What do you tell younger writers who come to you with the usual desperate question: How do I become a writer? Homesicknessthis kind of interrupted loveis a big element in your work. And why is writing a white mans world? He was called Daniel at first, and at one point was black. Even though I hadnt experienced it yet, I understood something about the concierge, all the French institutions and personalities. Talking about Richard and our early hostile period, which I thought was ridiculously blown out of proportion, I should say that when I thought I was dealing with Richard, I was in fact thinking of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Toms Cabin. -in a 1984 interview withThe Paris Review. How do you respond to that? I didnt know anyone and I didnt want to know anyone. . I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed. You can see in it the sentimentality of Jane Eyre. I cant read a speech. They were an attempt to get me beyond the chaos I mentioned earlier. So I never answered it, and Im not answering it now. It was a great revelation to me. Nothing would change in that way, I felt, and that essay was a beginning of my finding a new vocabulary and another point of view. How did you eventually find your way out of the pain? Essentially, America has not changed that much, you told the New York Times when Just Above My Head was being published.

The death of my father. We lunched on an August weekend, together with seasonal guests and his secretary. Find a way to keep alive and write. There isnt any other vantage point, there is no other point of view. After the fact I may discuss a work, yet Im uncertain that what I do say about it afterwards can be taken as gospel. On the other hand, the world of John Cheever did engage me. Usually its a matter of writing, recognizing it aint right or it wont move. Most of the rewrite, then, is cleaning. The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably cant, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. So time alters you, actually becoming either an enemy or a friend. And, of course, an unavoidable curiosity. James Baldwin in Hyde Park, London. I didnt know what was going to happen to me in France but I knew what was going to happen to me in New York. And so, when I got to Paris, I had to discharge all that, which was really the reason for my essay, Everybodys Protest Novel. I was convinced thenand I still amthat those sort of books do nothing but bolster up an image. Ive been compelled in some ways by describing my circumstances to learn to live with them. What held me in Paris laterfrom 55 to 57was the fact that I was going through a kind of breakup in my private life, yet I knew I had to go back to America. I loved dressing up and going out. Im still learning how to write. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

My reflexes were tormented by the plight of other people.

Well, minor characters are the subtext, illustrations of whatever it is youre trying to convey. The point up to the suicide is like a long prologue, and it is the only light on Ida. So salvation is a difficult word to use in such a context. I have nothing against him in any case. I start working when everyone has gone to bed. Its a fascinating time to be living. And so, we havent seen each other. You mean to say their actions are less accountable? When you were much younger, what distinctions did you make between art and protest? This was all before I was nineteen. Its entirely subjective, what Im saying. I couldnt sit somewhere honing my talent to a fine edge after I had been to all those places in the South and seen those boys and girls, men and women, black and white, longing for change. . In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. I write at night. I dont know what happened to them. Novels that havent worked, loves, struggles. The two roles are completely unattached. In some ways Ive changed precisely because America has not. Nevertheless, it seems that your struggles with social injustices were kept apart as the material for your essays, while your fiction dealt predominantly with your own past. How is this person real by dint of that bar blaring across the page? I was very young then. Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on Antigua in 1949. . If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if youre not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. You have often left your home in St. Paul, returning to America and going on the road. And the most fearful thing, too. I was pulled out of school to take care of my youngest brother while my mother went to work, and when she realized I hadnt been looking after him properly, that I had been reading instead, she gathered all the books I had stolen from the library over the years and burned them. Not so metaphorically. Is there any resistance today to black writers in publishing houses? I believe this is true for you as well. I was hurt . Well, joy, love, the passion to feel how our choices affect the world . . Its not happening to me in the same way, because Im James Baldwin; Im not riding the subways and Im not looking for a place to live. Id been in the region in 1949, but I had never dreamt of coming to live in St. Paul. And Im still going to be a great writer when I grow up. Reading had taken me away for long periods at a time, yet I still had to deal with the streets and the authorities and the cold. Sunlit, obsequious, and revoltingly basic.. Have you? And it was inevitably painful, and surprising, and indeed, bewildering. I dont know, I doubt whether anyonemyself at leastknows how to talk about writing. If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. You say the city beat him to death. But they didnt have any long-term plan in mind. Until then homesickness was something I only knew from books. Oh yes, to get it out and get it right. In a novel or a play youre trying to show them something. His subject is himself and the world and it requires every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are. But I think of the impact of spokespersons like Toni Morrison and other younger writers. I just knocked on his door out in Brooklyn! Leave me alone, Ill figure it out. I was very wounded and I was very dangerous because you become what you hate. Ideally, however, what a critic can do is indicate where youve been excessive or unclear. Aside from the collected Talk Stories (2001), her nonfiction works include A Small Place (1988), a reckoning with the colonial legacy on Antigua; My Brother (1997), a memoir of the tragedy of AIDS in her family; and two books on gardening, My Garden (Book) (1999) and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (2005). He took all the light in the book, and then the book stopped and nobody in the book would speak to me. When she was sixteen, her family interrupted her education, sending her to work as a nanny in New York. Lucy is about the making of a person. We never spoke about our work, or very rarely. There were things I couldnt deal with technically at first. The idea wasnt that I would establish myself and then have the rest of my family join me. I never trusted him at all. My mother came from Dominica, and the thing about those little islands is that people from one island or the other dont like each other. But I was fascinated by the trial, which also involved a wealthy playboy and his wife in high-level society. But most of the books I reviewed were Be Kind to Niggers, Be Kind to Jews, while America was going through one of its liberal convulsions. I was sick, went to four or five hospitals. When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what youre talking about. No one can tell him about that. I wasnt, perhaps, but I certainly felt more at ease with myself. I was launched into the publishing world, so to speak. I think really through my brother, David. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. Its what happened to my father and I didnt want it to happen to me. No. It wasnt so much a matter of choosing Franceit was a matter of getting out of America. What other people write about me is irrelevant, you once wrote in Essence. Something like that? . One of the reasons I wrote what I did about the book is a technical objection, which I uphold today. I was scared then and Im scared now. My father didnt think it was possiblehe thought Id get killed, get murdered. A childrens book, Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip, came out in 1986. I ended up smoking Lucky Strikes, just because I liked the way it looked, the gesture. . Talent is insignificant. I got to Paris with forty dollars in my pocket, but I had to get out of New York. You have to have the [guts] to protest the slogan, no matter how noble it may sound. If I had stayed there, I would have gone under, like my friend on the George Washington Bridge. I think it was simply absurd to talk about this monster created by the American public, and then expect the public to save it! Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talentwhich attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. What kind of conversations would you hold? Things may be said which hurt, and you dont like it, but what are you to do?

Was that meant to go unqualified; do you not relate to criticism in any way? If you try to pretend you dont see the immediate reality that formed you I think youll go blind. When I arrived in Paris in 1948 I didnt know a word of French. She cooks with flair. And after my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. How to find my way around in it, not get lost in it, and not feel rejected by it. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. You are struck by the fact of your mortality, that it is unlikely youll live another forty years. Now, though, a kid now . Ive got five sisters. His hatred was suppressed and turned against himself. I was broke. I dont consider myself a spokesmanI have always thought it would be rather presumptuous. Well, I refuse to. I was nineteen. In my case it is due to the fact that Im always doing some kind of research. Probably that way for everybody: something that irritates you and wont let you go. Most of all, I couldnt deal with me. Do you have a reader in your mind when you write? The people I worked with were left-of-center Trotskyites, Socialist Trotskyites. Dont describe a purple sunset, make me see that it is purple. I went through a very trying period, after all, where on one side of town I was an Uncle Tom and on the other the Angry Young Man.

From this fascination came the first version of Giovannis Room, something called Ignorant Armies, a novel I never finished. . None of it comes easy. I might have gone to the University of the West Indies. I was handicapped with Soul on Ice, because what I might have said in those years about Eldridge would have been taken as an answer to his attack on me. Baldwins mood had brightened considerably since the previous day, and we entered the office and study he refers to as his torture chamber.. Would you suggest that a young writer from a minority consecrate himself to that minority, or is his first obligation his own self-realization as a writer? And she had to climb five flights of stairs every morning to make sure I was kept alive. I couldnt allow anything to happen to me because what then would happen to them? Richards Native Son was the only contemporary representation there was of a black person in America. You become imprecise. And after you put them on paper you dont see them anymore. Everybody Ive been close to drinks. . I was here in St. Paul, living in Le Hameau across the road. When do you know something is the way you want it? Photograph by Allan Warren,The Paris Review No. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. Every form is difficult, no one is easier than another. . In time, she put herself on another path. Id love to meet him for lunch tomorrow, and share a bottle of bourbon, and probably talk about the last twenty years we havent seen each other. My fathermy stepfatherhad gotten ill, and my parents had three boy children. Is that the way a book starts for you, though? Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance. We get on very well now. That is the turn of the screw. One critic suggested that James Baldwins best work was yet to come and would be an autobiographical novel, which Just Above My Head was in part. . No nostalgia. Thats not quite the way they saw it, but still I was the oldest brother, and I took it very seriously, I had to set an example. Subscribe for free:Stitcher|Apple Podcasts|Google Play, 2022 The Paris Review. Those years were difficult, and yet you received four writing grants between 1945 and 1956. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. Social affairs are not generally speaking the writers prime concern, whether they ought to be or not; it is absolutely necessary that he establish between himself and these affairs a distance which will allow, at least, for clarity, so that before he can look forward in any meaningful sense, he must first be allowed to take a long look back. When youve finished a novel it means, The train stops here, you have to get off here. You never get the book you wanted, you settle for the book you get. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. Insofar as the American public creates a monster, they are not about to recognize it. Write. I was for a time a waiter . He helped me with my first novel, really. I still have the clothes I bought at Bonwit Teller. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. Did you take a position on his book about Nat Turner? The story would be different if it were in France, or even in England. But now that Im established I do it because Im alone at night. They are more a part of the decora kind of Greek chorus.

Do you agree with Alberto Moravia, who said that one ought only to write in the first person, because the third projects a bourgeois point of view? Find a way to keep alive and write. thats all. Her hundreds of plants are layered into a composition of informal design, expressive of her refined aesthetic and untroubled eccentricity. We saw each other at suppertime. This Corsican family, for reasons Ill never understand, took care of me. Im not asking that anybody get on picket lines or take positions. Write a White Paper, or a Black Paper, defending yourself? Got sick in Istanbul, went to London, got sick in London, and I wanted to die. To my surprise I wasnt thrown out of the hotel.

But it has got to be triggered by something, it cannot be triggered by itself. All rights reserved, In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for. I cant say about any of my characters that they are utter fictions. In an Esquire essay, you once wrote that youve been schooled in adversity and skilled in compromise. Does that perhaps reflect trying to get your work published? She went from the New School in Manhattan to Franconia College in New Hampshire, and worked at Magnum Photos and at the teen magazine Ingenue. Do you think that now blacks and whites can write about each other, honestly and convincingly? But in fact, its been gestating for a long, long time. It always hides something else; the writer should try to expose what it hides. In fact, the hardest thing I ever wrote was that suicide scene in Another Country.

When I was young, people thought you were not so much wicked as sick, they gave up on you. And then I was able to write. But the essay is a little bit simpler, isnt it, because youre angry about something which you can put your finger on .

Did you read a great deal? You can probably tell from my writing that Im obsessed with notions of justice and injusticethose things that are wrong that can never be made right. During the civil-rights movement I was in the back of a church in Tallahassee and the pastor, who recognized me, called my name and asked me to say a few words. You are speaking to an old rat. Most of the novelists Ive spoken to claim they read exceedingly fewer contemporary novels, but find themselves drawn to plays, history, memoirs, biographies, and poetry. So once youve captured a character in your work, it is no longer a phantom? Im still learning how to write. I thought of going to Israel, but I never did, and I was right about that. . It was that or nothing, since in my own mind I was the father of my family. They are overwritten. I wasnt part of any community until I later became the Angry Young Man in New York.

If you felt that it was a white mans world, what made you think that there was any point in writing? Yes, butand here Im in trouble with the language againit depends upon how you conceive of yourself. This is where reading Henry James helped me, with his whole idea about the center of consciousness and using a single intelligence to tell the story. Were the sermons you delivered from the pulpit very carefully prepared, or were they absolutely off the top of your head? I was twenty-one. . After a time you find, however, that your characters are lost to you, making it quite impossible for you to judge them. Wasnt Giovannis Room partially an attempt to break down these divisions, pointing out that David could be white, black, or yellow? This conversation began at a public event at the 92nd Street Y in 2013, and was picked up again in her Vermont kitchen eight years later, in the summer of 2021, when the social restrictions of the pandemic had, for a time, eased. She has plants that move her because of how they look or how they behave, or because of their histories. Are you, or do you remain, very close to your characters? Perhaps the turning point in ones life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one. We sang songs, drank a little too much, and on occasion chatted with the people who were dropping in to see us. Im troubled over getting my work done and over all the things Ive not learned. Id already been defined. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didnt know you had. I gather Ralph did not like what he considered I was doing to myself on the civil-rights road.

It is never entirely true that you dont give a shit what others say about you, but you must throw it out of your mind. It was impossible for me to drop them a visit and then leave. The risks, in any case, are exactly the same. Thats not true now. Oh, he was taken directly from that friend, yet, oddly enough, he was the last person to arrive in the novel. -from the introduction to Nobody Knows My Name. I was the best-dressed nanny you ever saw. Later, when Id encountered other Americans, I began to avoid them because they had more money than I did and I didnt want to feel like a freeloader. The handsomest arrested man in the world just signed a book deal. I managed to get through it and when I walked down from the pulpit and back up the aisle, a little old black lady in the congregation said to a friend of hers, Hes little, but hes loud!. Can you talk a little more about your relationship to Richard Wright, under whose aegis you received your first writing grant? . I suppose that my work is always mourning something, the loss of a paradisenot the thing that comes after you die, but the thing that you had before. They are freer, for that moment, than you are partly because they are dead. I was always struck by the minor characters in Dostoyevsky and Dickens. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. Yesat least I read his. I hated the we. And yet in your own writing you deal with personal experiences quite often. Everything is always around and before you. If you were both to meet over lunch tomorrow, what might you talk about? Because they own the business. The whole society has decided to make you nothing. I could not handle both propositions in the same book.

I do a lot of rewriting. This then is ones consolation, and you know that you must now proceed elsewhere. I admired him for confronting it, and the result. Those memories are a constant source of some strange pleasure for me. I read everything. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket. -from a 1979 interview published inThe New York Times. Do you think painters would help a fledgling writer more than another writer might? It is piled with writing utensils and drafts of several works-in-progress: a novel, a play, a scenario, essays on the Atlanta child murders, these last compiled in The Evidence of Things Not Seen. No, no, it happens when you are right here at the table. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. Im speaking of the working process, which demands a certain amount of energy and courage (though I dislike using the word), and a certain amount of recklessness. Ive had to do that ever since I was youngI had to wait until the kids were asleep. The Saxton was intended to help you finish the novel you were working on?

Important in that particular novel, yes, but Another Country is called that because it is trying to convey the reality of that country. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. Then I got sick. Ive always felt that when a book ended there was something I didnt see, and usually when I remark the discovery its too late to do anything about it. But something forces you to anyway. I lived in Paris long enough to finish my first novel, which was very important for me (or I wouldnt be here at all). None of it comes easy. I might do it differently today, but then, to have a black presence in the book at that moment, and in Paris, would have been quite beyond my powers. His hours and mine are very different. Our second talks were held at Baldwins poutres-and-stone villa in St. Paul de Vence, where he has made his home for the past ten years. In the worst sense. In person and on the page, Kincaids is a literary voice. As your experience about writing accrues, what would you say increases with knowledge? Best Books of the Year (So Far): Crime Fiction in 2022, Six Private School Thrillers For the Grown-Up and Graduated, Bad Seeds and Mad Scientists: On the Build-A-Humans of 19th-Century Literature, The Best International Crime Fiction Out This June and July. . Giovanni was at a party and on his way to the guillotine. Thats what I try to teach all young writerstake it out! I find most of them too remote for me. like George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London. Borrowing money whenever I couldoften at the last minuteI moved from one hotel to another, not knowing what was going to happen to me. The terrace that starts at the back door ends in a border of stones; the lawn, planted with thousands of daffodils, slopes down to a thickly shaded creek. Its not the same thing as accepting them. Is ones past cluttered, as a celebrated writer? I had such contempt for a certain kind of writing, which I would now call white writing. It was so dull and mannered. . I dressed in old clothes, thrift-shop clothes. The writers point of view in an essay is always absolutely clear. And after that was Paris. I dont think about it that way, no. The publication date is something else again. You are fascinated, I am fascinated by a certain optica process of seeing things. Ive never seen one in any case . I had to go through a time of isolation in order to come to terms with who and what I was, as distinguished from all the things Id been told I was. From my point of view, there was nothing in the least idealistic about Richard. And once youve had that experience, you see differently. Yes, true, but not at all by death. I was a young Socialist. An essay is not simpler, though it may seem so. There is nothing else to say. Im not so sure! The moment in which I had to stand up and walk down the aisle and stand in that pulpit was the strangest moment in my life up to that time. my father died, and I sat down and figured out what I had to do. Gertrude said, I dont look like that. And Picasso replied, You will. And he was right. Returning Sunday at Baldwins invitation, the sun was shining and we were able to lunch outdoors at a picnic table, shaded by a bower that opened onto property dotted with fruit trees and a spectacular view of the Mediterranean littoral. I dont try to be prophetic, as I dont sit down to write literature. I was very lucky, because I couldve gone mad. I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, Look. I looked and all I saw was water. Do you believe in a community of writers? Most of the rewrite, then, is cleaning. Thousands of such tracts were published during those years and it seems to me I had to read every single one of them; the color of my skin made me an expert. Entirely. It was a great shock to me, forty. Sometimes it comes very quickly. He was known to some of the people I knewI didnt know him personally. And those people trusted me. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. And the cigarette has gone out. He couldnt let it outhe could only let it out in the house with rage, and I found it happening to myself as well. -from Autobiographical Notes, in theCollected Essays from Library of America. Lets go back now.